ET Lost His Baby Teeth

There is a reason that J.J. Abrams and Stephen Spielberg have kept their new movie free of plot stealing trailers. It is so much more satisfying and rewarding to view a movie without it having been spoiled. I watched it at 12:01 last night, the first showing in town, anxious to watch this collaboration between two great storytellers who are masters at their genre. Here is all you need to know and a little trivia that stuck with me.

• The movie is set in the fictional town of Lillian, Ohio, in the summer of 1979.
• The movie is called Super 8 because a group of friends are shooting their own zombie movie using their parents’ home movie cameras.
• Spielberg’s single parent card is played, but this time it is a couple of the moms who are out of the picture. Dysfunctional families, stupid adults and a corrupt military are of course a part of the story line.
• The tale feels like a grown up Goonies and a much more mature ET. However, there might be more laughs in this movie than the other two combined.
• The suspense feels like Jaws and Jurassic Park (the first ones, not the sequels).
• The music reminds you of L O S T and the songs you loved in Jr High.
• The kids in the film are great. Elle Fanning (little sister of Dakota) and Joel Courtney (who is from Idaho) are fantastic leads.
• As for the rating, it deserves its PG-13 label. There is drug and alcohol use- but both are put in a negative light. The action is intense- you won’t fall asleep in this film. The attack sequences are startling- but there is very little blood and nothing grotesque. The teenage friends all swear quite a bit- but if these things happened in your small town, you might let an expletive or two slip yourself.
• Super 8 is definitely not a little kids’ flick. But try to convince your 11-year old son that he has to wait two years to see this film and I’m sure there will be a PG-13 rated response. You might as well just take him.

Are there lessons to learn from this film? Sure, you could create a devotional booklet about guilt, sacrifice, and forgiveness. You could also key off the main theme (which I won’t reveal here) and discuss how it relates to biblical passages. But I think I’ll find that the best value in this film was being caught up in the magic, sneaking down to the theater to pick up my tickets in advance, surprising my two boys, stuffing our faces with breakfast cereal before we left for the midnight showing, and discussing the moments of the film non-stop on the way home, ending with our plans to see it again (hopefully at the drive-in) and who we will take with us to enjoy the best summer movie in years.