Donnie Darko2001
Overall7.0
Fear3.0
Atmos8.0
Gore1.0
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teen
Super 8
2011 · PG-13 · 1h 52m
It arrives.
Small-town Ohio, summer 1979. The town smells like cut grass and gasoline. Things have started disappearing — dogs, electronics, neighbors. Nobody knows where any of them have gone.
Super 8 is J.J. Abrams' 2011 sci-fi homage to early-Spielberg filmmaking, set in a small Ohio steel-mill town in 1979. A group of teenage friends shooting a low-budget zombie movie on a Super 8 camera witness a catastrophic train derailment late one night — and stranger things begin happening in their town as the Air Force moves in to control the aftermath. The film blends coming-of-age drama with monster-movie dread, all suffused with the warm, anxious texture of late-70s Americana.
adventurescience-fictiondramahorrorthriller
Tags
atmospheric
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Scores
Based on 1 rating
7.4
Overall
Fear3.0
Gore1.0
Atmosphere8.8
LanguageEnglish
RatingPG-13
Running time1h 52m
SpoilersSynopsis — contains plot detailsSynopsis↓
Lillian, Ohio, 1979. Joe Lamb is a teenager whose mother died recently in a workplace accident at the local steel mill. He and his father, Deputy Jackson Lamb, are still raw with grief. Joe spends his summer helping his friend Charles direct a zombie movie on a Super 8 camera for a kids' film festival. The crew includes Joe (makeup), Cary, Martin, Preston — and a new addition: Alice Dainard, the older girl Charles cast as the female lead. Alice's father Louis is a depressed mill worker whom Joe's father blames for his wife's death.
The kids sneak out one night to shoot a scene at a rural train station. As they film, a pickup truck deliberately drives into the path of an oncoming Air Force freight train. The collision is catastrophic — boxcars erupt, debris flies for miles, the kids barely escape. The Super 8 camera keeps rolling.
The driver turns out to be Joe's biology teacher, Dr. Woodward — a former military scientist who survived the impact long enough to warn the kids that they cannot tell anyone what they saw or "they will kill you and your parents." He dies as the Air Force arrives.
Strange things start happening. Dogs run away. Microwaves and electronics vanish. Power fails. People disappear. The Air Force, led by Colonel Nelec, locks down the area and lies about the cause of the crash.
The kids investigate. They develop the Super 8 footage and find their camera captured something massive and alien escaping from the wreckage.
The truth surfaces. The Air Force has been holding an alien prisoner for nearly twenty years — captured after its ship crashed in the 1950s. It is intelligent. The boxcars were transporting it. Dr. Woodward had been part of the original team studying it and had grown sympathetic; he sacrificed himself to free it.
The alien is collecting people, electronics, and metal in tunnels beneath the town — assembling a way to repair its ship and go home. Captives are alive but webbed up in its underground lair.
Alice is taken from her house. Her father Louis, whom Jackson Lamb had unjustly arrested, is released. Joe and his father — slowly reconciling around the search for Alice — are caught up in escalating Air Force operations that have set parts of the town on fire.
