Super 8 Returns to Streaming on Peacock 15 Years After Its Release

Kyle Chandler has had a big year. He built his career on shows like Friday Night Lights and movies like Carol, and he has become one of the most reliable presences on screen. This year he starred in HBO’s widely praised Lanterns. The series expands the DC universe and gives Hal Jordan his definitive live-action take. It also gave Chandler another chance to play a reluctant father figure.

Years before he mentored John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), Chandler perfected the grumpy dad in an overlooked 2011 movie. J.J. Abrams wrote and directed Super 8, and a cast led by talented kids, including Elle Fanning, stars in it. It is one of my favorite Abrams movies. It is also still the only original film he has directed.

What is Super 8 about?

Steven Spielberg produced Super 8, and the film owes him a great deal. It is set in 1979 in a small Ohio town. Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) is a 14-year-old who has just lost his mom. His dad, Jackson (Chandler), is the deputy sheriff. Grief has left Jackson unable to connect with his son. He spends his days working, so Joe fends for himself. He passes the summer outside the house, riding bikes and making movies with his nerdy friends. The film is a full-on Amblin throwback that feels a lot like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. That is absolutely on purpose.

Joe and his friends are hard at work on a zombie movie. He handles makeup while the others direct, shoot and star. Miraculously, they get Alice (Fanning), the school’s mysterious cool girl, to play one of the leads. During a late-night shoot, the group witnesses something inexplicable.

They are filming a scene with a train passing in the background when a truck veers onto the tracks. The collision sparks a massive explosion. The kids approach the driver, who is wounded but alive, and try to talk to him. He scares them off and tells them to forget everything they saw. The next day the town is turned on its head. The military arrives, dogs go missing and power blackouts begin. What pulls the kids fully into the mystery is what their camera captured that night: a large, mysterious creature getting out of the train.

The E.T. homage kicks in here. The creature is an alien that has been trapped on Earth for years, imprisoned by the government. As the story develops, the kids come to understand the alien. Joe bonds with it and wants to help it get home. Unlike E.T., this alien is large and scary (not that E.T. is that cute). It also has magnetic powers that the government wants to exploit.

The Amblin movie you need

Super 8 came out in 2011, before Stranger Things, and it captured the same nostalgic energy that made the Netflix series a worldwide phenomenon. The kids are charming and have great chemistry. Most of them are well drawn, with quirks and personality traits that make you care about them and their friendship. The movies they make are amazing too, with great practical effects like melting eyeballs. Even the gloriously melodramatic, awkward teen acting has its charm. In a film full of military action and otherworldly intervention, the kids’ amateur movies might be the most unrealistic part. They are just too good.

The dynamic between Joe and Alice stands out. Their budding romance is complicated by the other boys’ crush on Alice and by her dad, who has a mysterious link to Joe’s family. Both have lost their mothers, and both have tense relationships with their fathers. To the puzzlement of the rest of the friend group, Alice and Joe instantly recognize something in each other.

Watching the kids bicker and share the screen is delightful, but the emotional weight of the story lies in Joe and Jackson’s relationship. After his wife’s death, Jackson doesn’t know how to connect or even speak with his son. At the start of the film, the only thing he can think of is to ship Joe off to baseball camp. “It’s what we both need,” he says. Their relationship stays distant until both grow more involved in the town’s mystery. Jackson leads the adult half of the film as the police investigate the strange occurrences.

Chandler has played the guarded, gruff dad in some form for years, from Coach Taylor in Friday Night Lights to Hal Jordan in Lanterns. In Super 8, he plays Jackson as aloof and stubborn, unwilling to connect with the most important person in his life. Still, he brings so much empathy that you can’t help rooting for him. You hope he can figure out how to express himself before it’s too late.

Super 8 isn’t perfect. It loses steam in its third act once the mystery needs resolving. Still, it shows Abrams’ strengths as a storyteller. We all know he can lead a franchise, but he also has a knack for anchoring big movies with genuine emotion, like grief and the wistfulness of growing up. On the surface, Super 8 is a monster movie. What sticks are the kids’ friendships and the father-son story at its core. And if that isn’t enough of a selling point, the dad is peak Kyle Chandler.

Super 8 is streaming on Peacock.

Source: Polygon