Thank Goodness Super 8 Didn’t Come Out Earlier

If Super 8 had been released just a few years earlier, say in 2002-2008, every movie critic in America would have seen it as an obvious allegory for the War On Terror, and devoted 1/3 of their review wordcounts to the subject.

Wait, you say. This is just a Spielbergian alien-monster movie!

Well sure, the moral is that the alien just wants to go home, not be trapped/studied, and that’s a lot like E.T. But E.T. was about loneliness and redemption through the power of friendship, and pretty lights. J.J. Abrams, who likes lens flares better than pretty lights, is more interested in lecturing to us that if we act on our fear and paranoia, the monster – very unlike E.T. – will automatically attack us and kill is. If we fail to heed that lesson, an impotent failure/stubbornness which is embodied by the actions of the military in the movie, we’re in for a world of hurt.

See what I mean now? What 2004 movie reviewer would have been able to resist splattering ‘Bush’, ‘Iraq’, ‘Muslims’, and ‘war on terror’ throughout his review? Indeed, what mainstream-or-leftward commentator of any sort would have been able to see a movie about a murderous monster rampaging through an American suburb without mentally connecting it to Muslims and then haughtily, progressively lecturing America about how racist we are against Muslims for not understanding the murderous mo er, the Muslims?

This main plot is paralleled in miniature by the father/town-drunk subplot: the father has experienced a tragic, terrible loss, which he blames bitterly on the town drunk (the ‘monster’ in microcosm). But only by overcoming his bitterness, and learning to forgive and accept, is he able to find and reconnect with his son. The touching climax finds the son, too, ‘letting go’ of the tragic loss he suffered. Again, simple Spielbergian broken-family story, or might it have political implications? Then again, what movie in 2002-2008 didn’t have ‘political implications’?

Because of course I’m being dumb. What am I thinking. It is not 2004 but 2011, and the President is not George W. Bush but Barack Obama, the letter after the his name is not (R) but (D), and the U.S. having a troop presence in Iraq (which we still do) is no longer The Worst Foreign Policy Blunder In American History that everyone is obsessed with whining about 24/7, it is now something that no one really gives a rat’s ass about.

So, the movie reviewers all now just recognize Super 8 to be a Spielberg-homage nostalgia film made by a juvenile man-child, and rollicking good entertainment at that.

Which it is, of course; don’t get me wrong. I don’t really think it’s intended as a war-on-terror parable. My point is that nor did I think most of those other movies were.

It’s just fascinating to me how the Presidency being held by this or that party can create something like a lens through which everything gets filtered for so many. And how it completely colors everything about not just news events but seemingly unrelated, trivial things such as pop culture.

Let’s put it this way: I’d have never been able to enjoy Super 8 so mindlessly before November 2008.

If I were to have one gripe about the film, it’s that it gets so much about the period wrong. Why bother setting a period movie so specifically – June something 1979 – if you’re not going to do your research, even basic wiki’ing:

Rubik’s cube? Not yet sorry. The Walkman? Released in Japan first, later that year. “Don’t Bring Me Down” by ELO? July 1979. The kids sing “My Sharona” – only just released, not #1 on the charts till later that year. Three Mile Island meltdown? March not June. One kid says “awesome” as kid-slang for “great”, which I’m afraid I can’t admit into evidence till perhaps 1981-82.

Because I like my nostalgia, packaged in a psychic alien-monster movie, to be accurate, dag nabit. Accuracy is my concern here dude.