Film / Super 8

"There's a reason that Super 8, its cool thrills, also seems a work of innocence: it takes incidental inspiration from the films of a director who, back in 1979, was the J.J. Abrams of his day. Look closely and you'll see that Super 8 is a medley of tropes from the films of Spielberg's early prime."

— Richard Corliss, Time magazine

Super 8 is a 2011 Science Fiction monster film written and directed by J. J. Abrams and produced by Steven Spielberg. It is an homage to classic "adventurous children" movies, particularly those made/produced by Spielberg, like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Goonies and especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

A group of middle schoolers in a small Ohio town in 1979 are dedicated to making a zombie movie to enroll in an upcoming film festival, with Charles as script-writer and director, his best friend Joe as the make-up artist and other cast and crew members like Martin (lead actor), Cary (pyrotechnic/pyromaniac) and Preston (misc crew/extras). Charles manages to convince a girl and classmate, Alice, to play the part of the wife, and she and Joe start to form an affection for each other. Unfortunately, there are some lingering emotions surrounding the death of Joe's mom several months prior, as well problems with his distant father, a deputy in the local sheriff's office.

While filming a scene late at night, they happen upon a freak train crash and barely escape before the authorities show up. Shaken up by the experience, they find that they accidentally filmed something on their Super 8-mm film camera in the aftermath of the crash, and soon they're caught up in strange happenings and a secret military operation.

An interactive version of the teaser trailer is bundled with Portal 2, found in the game's Extras section. There's also a prequel comic book that was bundled into the second issue of the Batman: Arkham City comic book tie-in. It details the 1958 events referred to in the film and how Col. Nelec got involved with the situation.

Not to be confused with 8mm, and has nothing to do with the motel chain, either.

---

This film provides the following examples:

• The '70s: Takes place in 1979, and does a fabulous job of capturing the look of the time.
• Alcoholic Parent: Alice's father. He was drinking the morning of the factory accident, which led to Joe's mother taking his shift and her untimely death.
• Aliens in Cardiff: Area 51 stuff happening in a small Ohio town somewhere west of Dayton, possibly tying into the rumors that the nearby Wright-Patterson AFB was the storage place of the alien bodies and wreckage from the Roswell crash.
• Allohistorical Allusion: The Three Mile Island accident, which took place in the same year as the events of the film, is mentioned in the news in one scene.
• Alternate Reality Game:
  • Naturally there'd be one. It involves a site about Ice Cream Lollipop called Rocket Poppeteers. There's Scariest Thing I Ever Saw, Hook, Line and Minker and S8 Editing Room.
  • The editing room is especially good as you have to unlock clips and put them together forming one big video (which features the Truck Guy who apparently was involved in some experiments relating to the monster). Clips can be unlocked from looking through Super 8 standees in theaters and watching the title card after the trailer and using the Super 8 app.
• Always Save the Girl: The mysterious things that are happening in town are overall dismissed by the kids as they try to make the film, but the moment Alice is kidnapped is the moment they all race to try to figure out what is going on so they can rescue her.
• Amateur Film-Making Plot: Charles's zombie movie The Case, eventually shown in full during the end credits.
• Anachronism Stew: When finding the mysterious metal cubes in the train crash, the gang exclaims that they resemble Rubix Cubes — which were not introduced until 1980, one year after the movie is set.
• An Aesop:
  • Misunderstandings can ruin lives and relationships, but they can be healed with understanding and communication.
  • "Drugs are so bad!", Martin moans after Donny stones himself to sleep. Played for Laughs.
• Area 51: That's where the train's cargo comes from. So, obviously, it's trouble.
• Armies Are Evil: Not entirely so, but army men are not pleasant guys to deal with, and one of them tortured the alien and turned him against humanity.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • After the train derailment when the kids are all driving away, they're freaking out over Woodward's warnings. Charles is just as distressed, but not about entirely the same things.
  • "You will die; your parents will die... this is not good information!" "I've never had a teacher aim a gun at me!" "That train could've killed us!" "Oh shit, the focus ring fell off my camera! The lens is totally cracked!"
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • A whole train was pulled off the tracks by just a truck, whose driver survived.
    "How could a pickup truck derail a train, man? That's impossible!"
    "Obviously, it isn't."
  • Tanks are shown firing their main guns in very close proximity to characters, which should have knocked them down and made them deaf at the very least.
• Asshole Victim: Nelec and the soldiers are pretty rude to the kids at best and kill Dr. Woodward, so we don't feel all that sad when the alien eats them all.
• As You Know: A few times with the kids, who usually respond with a huffy, "I know that!"
• The Atoner:
  • Dr. Woodward, due to his guilt over being one of the scientists that kept the alien imprisoned, and finding out from a mental link that it's just scared and wants to go home.
  • Alice's father turns out to be this as well, as he was indirectly responsible for the death of Joe's mother and sought out forgiveness.
• Avoid the Dreaded G Rating:
  • Donny saying "fuck" (amongst other curses from the children) and Nelec's unusually gory death were probably put in to ensure a PG-13 rating.
  • Interestingly, the film was originally going to have a scene where Joe masturbates as a Censor Decoy, but the scene never made it past the script because the filmmakers decided it would be too creepy.
• Badass Teacher: Dr. Woodward, the biology teacher at the main characters' middle school, crashes into the train. The best part is that he survives the crash. Turns out he's also one of the scientists who studied the monster.
• Bad "Bad Acting": Averted. Most of the acting in the movie the kids are working on is believably bad. Joe himself was called upon to play a soldier and was particularly stiff. Martin seems to be alright, but Alice got so emotional and into character as the wife during the rehearsal take that she stunned everyone. Amusingly, the poor editing of Charles' movie (seen over the ending credits) conceals this, since he chose to use a take where she had to yell over the sound of the train. As a result, she sounds just as bad as the other kids.
• Being Tortured Makes You Evil: Upon being tortured and experimented on by the military, the alien came to believe all humans were a potential threat and lashed out at them, taking civilians for his food supply and kidnapping anyone who sees him. In this case, he's not so much evil as he is dangerously paranoid.
• Big Bad: Colonel Nelec. While the creature gets its sinister musical motif, the Colonel gets his own, which sounds somewhat like a certain March.
• Big Eater:
  • Charles (the fat kid, duh!). Lampshaded by Cary.
  • The alien also, to judge by the massive hunk of beef being provided to it in an old video clip.
• Birds of a Feather: Joe and Alice both have neglectful fathers and missing mothers.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The alien is thoroughly weird-looking. It has six arms, feet that end with digging "chisels," and a body with multiple gaps or negative spaces that do not exist in Earth vertebrates. Its face looks surprisingly humanoid at first glance, but the lipped mouth can split horribly into a fanged set of mandibles, and the human-like eyes are normally covered by a reflective membrane.
• Black Dude Dies First:
  • Subverted. The first violent scene in the movie involves a train crash, in which Dr. Woodward — a black guy — is apparently killed when his truck gets hit by the train. However, despite appearing dead at first sight, he is actually alive and scares the crap out of the kids who come to investigate.
  • Played straight in the bus attack, when the first two soldiers to die are Overmeyer and the driver, Krause, who are both black guys. As if in silent acknowledgement of this trope, both of them have the most darkly hilariously "I hate my job" expressions on their faces when Nelec sends them out to track the alien, clearly knowing what's going to happen to them.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Joe eventually realizes that the alien isn't particularly malicious, it just wants to rebuild its ship and go home, but it has to eat something while it's on the run from the law, and basically feels the same way about humans that we would feel about some particularly nasty-but-small wild animals when we crash land in a foreign country - (an obnoxious nuisance at worst, but also the best food source available). The only time it displays actual murderous intent is during the bus attack, not without justification.
• Book Dumb: Joe's talents are obviously placed outside school subjects. In one scene he hides a test marked "C-" from Alice.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter: Charles' older sister, Jennifer, who is constantly complaining to their mother about wanting to go to a girl's party, but can't, due to babysitting duties. Used as a plot point, as it's the only way Charles is able to get them places during the events of the film by promising to babysit instead.
• Brick Joke:
  • A woman at the police department is looking for a woman with brown hair and "rollers." She's one of the people taken by the alien.
  • Cary's Electronic Football that was previously taken by Dr. Woodward. When the kids break into the "Dungeon" where all the confiscated items and Woodward's items were, the next scene has Cary playing it in the background.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Joe attempts to when his father forbids him from spending time with Alice.
• The Cameo: Dan Castellaneta as the car dealer and composer Michael Giacchino as one of the deputies.
• Captured Super-Entity: The alien since The '50s, under less-than-humane circumstances.
• Car Skiing: Happens when the creature slams into the military bus transporting the gang. Of note is that while the driver does succeed in getting the car back on the ground, the raised tires are totally destroyed on impact, forcing him to stop.
• Catchphrase: Charles has "That was mint!", "Shut up!", and "Production value!"
• Chalk Outline: The boys' movie features a chalk outline that was drawn around a corpse before it got up and left.
• Character Development: Joe. He starts off as a bit of a pushover, constantly helping Charles with his film and initially letting him blow up his model train. After bonding with Alice, Joe starts standing up for himself, eventually directing the kids to help Charles and taking Cary with him to save Alice. As noted by Donny, "When did he get so bossy?"
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The "dungeon," Dr. Woodward's container in the school parking lot, is mentioned briefly after the train accident before it turns out that is where Dr. Woodward's research is located.
  • Donny has a crush on Charles' older sister Jennifer, who wants to go to Wendy's party next week, but their mother makes her babysit the twins. This comes in handy when Charles convinces her to flirt with Donny so that the gang can be driven back to town to rescue Alice in exchange for Charles doing the babysitting for her so she can go to the party.
  • The film used during the train accident is later given to Joe's father by Preston, bringing him up to speed on the alien situation.
  • The water tower is shown a few times in the background before it is given any relevance.
  • The strange metallic cubes that the train was also carrying.
• Chekhov's Hobby: Cary's obsession with fireworks comes in handy later on when they need a diversion.
• Chekhov's Skill: A double one. The alien's ability to bond, and Joe's passion for train models, come in handy when it is time to build a new spaceship.
• Cliché Storm: In-Universe. The Case is all Night of the Living Mooks cliches rolled into one. A more realistic example, because it's hard to expect Andrei Tarkovsky material from a bunch of 14-year-olds who've been watching too many zombie movies.
• Cluster F-Bomb:
  • As summarized by none other than James Rolfe, "Coming from a guy that says 'shit' a lot, these kids say 'shit' all the time."
  • However, it's worth noting that if you pay attention, the swearing is mostly from Charles and Cary. The others either say bad words very rarely, or not at all.
• Colonel Badass: The Colonel spends his last few moments of life shooting the monster in the face — despite knowing it won't work — and staring it down before it eats him.
• Coming of Age Story: With, you know, an angry alien on the loose.
• Cool Car: If you like old-school '70s cars, almost all of them.
• Creative Closing Credits:
  • The credits show the entire film the gang was working on.
  • Credits Gag to the second degree ensues as the credits of the in-film film playing over the credits of the film are interrupted by a zombie attack.
• Cute Monster Girl: Alice, after Joe applies the zombie make-up.
• Damsel in Distress: Alice when she is captured by the alien.
• Deconstruction:
  • Of a sort. The plot shows a grittier realization of an E.T.-style alien arrival and some Goonies-esque meddling kids' entanglement in it. Ultimately, the kids have next to nothing to do with the alien's escape from Earth. Rather, the story is about the humans learning to forgive and move on with their lives. Whether or not the alien learned about human emotions it's likely unable to comprehend is pretty much irrelevant. In fact, the kids' and the alien's paths only briefly intersect a couple of times.
  • The creature is also a good deal more violent than most "crash-landed alien" movie characters, and after 20-something years of being tortured and experimented on, it's pissed off and ready to leave, and doesn't care who gets in its way. It's clearly some form of an apex predator — like the only other sentient species that has yet been identified in nature — and thinks nothing of kidnapping the native "wildlife" to feed on while it builds its spaceship. An intelligent animal the size of a bus has to eat a lot of food, and given that Lillian seems to have no large livestock, there's only one food source it can turn to.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Alice, who is initially cold towards Joe but quickly warms up to him once they spend time together.
• Department of Redundancy Department: From The Case – "This fell out of the pocket of the attacker's pocket."
• Didn't See That Coming: When the kids play one of the rolls of film from Woodward's trailer, Woodward is shown at one of the windows of the alien's prison cell, dangling a hunk of meat near the bars. The guy is just begging to be yanked through the window by an alien tentacle or whatever, and the audience steels itself with anticipation when all of a sudden he's snatched up by the alien's arm, sticking through another window thirty-something feet off the ground.
• Didn't Think This Through: Feeding an alien creature Reese's pieces works fine when it's approximately the size of a toddler. Not so much here: A highly intelligent apex predator the size of a school bus has to eat a lot of food to sustain itself, and given that Lillian seems to have no farm animals, there's pretty much only one food source available for the creature to choose from.
• Director Trademark: Slusho appears again as one of the advertised items at the Kelvin Gasoline store.
• Dirty Communists: Invoked when a woman suggests that all the weird stuff going on in town is a prelude to a Soviet invasion.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Colonel Nelec gets killed about 3/4 of the way through the movie. The climax of the film is Joe convincing the alien that it doesn't have to act like a monster.
• Disney Death: After the train accident, the gang find blood on some of the train wreckage and think that it's Alice's. Alice appears behind them and is uninjured; the blood is just fake blood from Joe's make-up box.
• Dogged Nice Guy: Joe towards Alice. It turns out Charles had the same idea too.
• Downer Beginning: We start with a funeral for Joe's mom.
• Dramatic Alien VTOL: It wouldn't be a proper '80s-style Spielberg movie without one.
• Dressing as the Enemy: After being detained by the Air Force, Jackson tricks a guard and knocks him out, stealing his uniform to escape the base.
• Dull Surprise: Averted within the movie itself, as all of the child actors are great. Played hilariously straight within The Case, where the acting is just lousy. Charles and Martin are decent, but Joe is painfully wooden when playing a soldier. Alice is the only one of the kids who seemingly has any acting ability, but most of that gets edited out of the film.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: In-Universe. The kids' film, The Case, ends with the hero saving his wife from the zombie disease...by wasting the only remaining dosage of the cure on her.
• Everyone Can See It: Between Joe and Alice.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: All the dogs in the area run away to other towns because they can tell there's a monster running around. Either that, or the equipment it's assembling makes a noise or smell humans can't detect, but they don't like at all.
• Evil Laugh: The noises made by the creature before it crushes the Colonel to paste sound suspiciously like a very nasty chuckle.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: How Cary explains why talking is bad in the silent reading section.
• Exposed Extraterrestrials: The creature.
• Face Death with Dignity: The Colonel appears to.
• Family-Unfriendly Violence: The alien kills a lot of people in rather brutal ways. Although it's only visible for a few scant moments, it's clear that the Colonel's entire upper body pretty much disappears in a splatter of blood across the window when the alien bites him.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: Deputy Lamb.
• Felony Misdemeanor: When the kids run into an empty house to escape the chaos wrecking their hometown, Charles starts chugging down a bottle of soda.
  Martin: Charles, what are you thinking, dude? That's not yours!
  Charles: What? I'm thirsty! I'm in a war zone!
• Flat "What": Cary emits one of these after Joe is able to convince the alien to spare the two of them and Alice during the climax.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Justified in that Cooper—the alien—is not a monster at all. Although he's still scary.
• Foreshadowing:
  • As the kids drive away from the train accident, they pass the gas station that gets prominence a few scenes later.
  • When the cube picked up from the crash site goes crazy in Joe's room and flies through a wall to the water tower, it notably passes through a poster of the space shuttle.
  • When Deputy Lamb is coming out of the press conference, a man comes up to him and tells him about "some kinda sinkhole" in his garage.
• Forgiveness: One of the major themes of the film.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The main group of boys fit this extremely well. Charles is choleric (focused on his film most of all, and low in patience), Martin is melancholic (practical but the most easily frazzled of the boys), Joe is leukine (pretty quiet and in general just goes with whatever the others want), Cary is sanguine (a loud and hyperactive boy with a love for fireworks), and Preston is phlegmatic (very smart but not as willing as the others to get involved).
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: At the end of The Case, Charles talks directly to the audience, only to be interrupted by a zombie tearing out his throat. It's a Shout-Out to grindhouse movies that did the exact same thing, and to the framing stories of a few Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes being invaded by the primary plots.
• Free-Range Children: The kids do sneak out at night, but they also spend all day on their own.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The alien is first briefly seen in the reflection of a gasoline puddle.
• Friend Versus Lover: Sort of. Alice wants Joe to stand up to Charles and not let him blow up his train model, while Charles is annoyed by Joe's new-found independence (or, as he puts it, "bossiness") due to Alice's encouragement. Although what really bothers Charles is that Alice likes Joe better than him.
• Funny Background Event:
  • When several of Martin's scripts sheets blow away, he is seen chasing them across the screen behind Joe and Alice. A little later, when Joe is putting make-up on and having a conversation with Alice, Charles and Martin have a heated argument over one of his lines being changed slightly just before filming.
  • In the same scene, watch Preston's mouth as he fakes conversation on the pay phone. Shortly afterwards he stops trying entirely when he's entranced by Alice's performance along with everyone else.
• Genre Deconstruction: In addition to being a Genre Throwback, arguably the basic plot of the movie asks the question "What if instead of being tiny, eating human food, and being adopted by kids, E.T. was huge, carnivorous, and got captured and tortured by the government before the kids could get to him?" Answer: he'd be a terrifying monster, who's not killing people for the fun of it (except the military), but, well, for a predator the size of a bus, Beer and Reese's Pieces ain't gonna cut it as a food supply. Also, The Meddling Kids Are Useless gets a damn good reason for once: this alien has a mission and will kill anything that gets in the way, and the military has no problem getting rid of witnesses. Joe manages to talk the alien out of killing any more people, but having killed Nelec (the bastard who deserves all of the vengeance) and with its ship fully rebuilt, it's a pretty moot point.
• Genre Throwback: The entire film appears to be honoring every late 1970s-1980s film that Steven Spielberg either directed or had a hand in:
  • Specifically Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the Midwest setting, power outages).
  • ET (the kids on bikes, coping with an alien that only wants to go home, and dealing with uncaring military authority figures).
  • The Goonies (group of motley kids trying to solve mysteries).
  • Even Deputy Lamb trying to find out what's going on with the disappearances in town is reminiscent of Chief Brody's investigations in Jaws.
  • The deputy punching out bad guys to steal their uniforms is a pretty blatant Shout-Out to Indiana Jones.
• Giant Spider: The creature sort of resembles one. It has six (not eight, but still many) limbs, its face can open up to reveal a spider-like maw, it has black, spider-like eyes when hunting, it can produce web (which it uses to tie up its human prey), and it is a carnivore. It's also subterranean, possibly referring to funnel web spiders. The creature can be more accurately described as a giant spider-human hybrid though, considering its humanoid torso, hands, face, and most importantly, its incredibly human eyes whenever it's calm.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: The conflict between the army and the alien. The army is highly xenophobic, and willing to go to grand lengths to bring the alien down. But they're mostly just doing their jobs, and even the worst of them has his redeeming qualities. Namely, sacrificing his life to let the kids escape the alien. Meanwhile, the alien has no problem with killing or kidnapping innocent people that get in his way, using kidnappees as a food source while he rebuilds his ship. However, he's more interested in leaving Earth than causing harm, and the whole reason he's attacking humans at all is because his terrible and inhumane treatment at the hands of the military has led him to believe that all humans are a potential threat. That and the fact that a two-story tall apex predator has to eat something, and since Lillian apparently has no livestock (and all the dogs were scared off by the alien), there's pretty much only one food source available.
• Gory Discretion Shot:
  • Averted. There is an explosion of blood against the bus window as the creature kills the Colonel as well as a shot of the creature feeding on a human leg after he consumes one of the hostages.
  • Played Straight when a bone is said to be poking out of Martin's leg after an explosion in the house and it has to be physically arranged back, but neither the injury nor the process is shown.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: There's a crashed military train with an escaped alien loose, a town that needs to be locked down, people and dogs disappearing all over the place... and nobody seems to notice a group of kids filming all of it? Eventually Colonel Nelec notices, but by then Joe's dad shows up to take both camera and Joe away.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: The shot cuts away so quickly that it's hard to notice the first time around, but the entire upper half of Colonel Nelec's body seemingly disappears in a massive cloud of blood when the alien bites him.
• Happier Home Movie: Joe and Alice watch a home movie of Joe as a baby with his mother.
• Headphones Equal Isolation: A gas station attendant is so busy rocking out to Blondie on his brand new Walkman that he doesn't hear the monster attack, nor feel the shockwaves from a police car being bounced off the ground 50 feet away.
• Heel–Face Turn: The alien monster, thanks to The Power of Friendship.
• Hell Is That Noise: The sound designers in this movie really earned their overtime pay. The creature's demonic-sounding roars and growls are terrifying. Especially during the bus scene.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Interestingly, the guy who delays the alien long enough for the kids to escape, and pays for it with his life, isn't one of the parents or Dr. Woodward, but Colonel Nelec.
• His Heart Will Go On: Joe's father eventually comes to terms with his wife's death.
• Holding Hands: Joe and Alice at the end of the film.
• Homage Shot: The setup of the train crash is nearly identical to the one in Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth. Indeed, it was Steven Spielberg's childhood attempts to replicate this train crash that led to his pursuit of a film career, which this film pays homage to.
• Humanity Ensues: In The Case, Det. Hathaway is about to reluctantly shoot his infected wife when the antidote starts taking effect.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters:
  • The creature itself has been stranded on Earth since the 1950s, and has been imprisoned and experimented on for the last couple of decades, and has only wanted to return home via its ship. More or less the reason for its aggression is because every human it sees (other than Dr. Woodward, with whom it establishes a mental link) is a potential threat, or expendable for the most part.
  • Averted with Joe, whose chat with the alien in the tunnel — "Bad things happen" — reveals to it that in a way, everybody hurts. And since the alien is holding Joe at the time and establishes a mind link by contact, the alien can see that Joe — who had by then forgiven Alice's father for what happened — is right.
  • From the prequel comic's tagline: "The Soviets sent a dog. The U.S. sent a Nuke." This is actually justified: the Soviets' probe was shot down, causing all the worst reactions...
• Immune to Bullets: The alien, which is a bit of a problem for Colonel Nelec when he's trapped in a bus by the alien with only an M-16. Even escalating to tanks doesn't help, as it's capable of making them veer off course with magnetism.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: In-movie example for The Case when Cary's zombie character gets impaled through the head on nails sticking out of the wall.
• Improbable Infant Survival: Despite a number of other violent deaths in the movie, all the kids make it out unscathed.
• In-Series Nickname: Cary calls Martin "Smartin", to his displeasure.
• Insufferable Genius: Charles can be quite arrogant and bossy when it comes to his film, but he clearly wants to make it more in-depth by adding emotional investment to it, such as giving the detective a wife. Which makes the amusingly awful result all the more funny.
• It Will Never Catch On: The sheriff is not impressed by the idea of everyone having their own Walkman. He isn't totally ignorant of its potential, though, and in fact sees how such an innocuous device could inspire an entire new trend. "It's a slippery slope," indeed.
• It's All My Fault: It's eventually revealed that Alice's father blames himself for Joe's mother's death, as she took on his shift at the factory on the day of the accident.
• It's Personal: The alien is pretty dispassionate and impersonal in the way it kills and eats humans, right up until it has Colonel Nelec cornered on the bus, and lets out a noise that sounds disturbingly close to laughter.
• Jump Scare: A few times. "Sir, is there a particular area you'd like me to-"
• Karmic Death: The Colonel finally meets his end at the hands of the creature he ordered experimentation on.
• Kick the Dog: One of the soldiers takes Joe's mother's locket. Joe gets it back later from the guy's corpse.
• Lens Flare: A drinking game based on them would end very badly for all involved. It's a J.J. Abrams movie.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste: The kids take advantage of a train crash and the soldiers in town in order to increase the "production values" of their film.
• Love Triangle: Joe and Charles both have crushes on Alice. Type 4, as Alice reciprocates Joe's crush once they form a bond.
• MacGuffin: The Super 8 footage of the crash - although it doesn't figure into the plot as heavily as one might expect.
• Made of Explodium: Just what the hell was in that tiny little pickup truck of Woodward's to derail a massive military train like that?
• Mad Bomber: Cary, to the concern of the kids' parents and sometimes his friends. But boy, does it pay it off.
• Meaningful Background Event: The alien monster and its antics; the story is about Joe and his father.
• Memento MacGuffin: The locket that belonged to Joe's mother. It ends up being the last piece of metal needed for the alien's ship.
• Missing Mom: Joe's mother is dead, and Alice's mother has left her family.
• "Mister Sandman" Sequence: Immediately following the Downer Beginning, kids excitedly run out of school for their first day of summer with Electric Light Orchestra's 1979 hit single "Don't Bring Me Down" blasting in the backdrop.
• Mood Whiplash: Several:
  • Joe's mother's funeral, which starts out very somber and then switches to the kids all arguing about the grisly manner in which she died.
  • The climax, when Joe talks down the alien from killing him and his friends immediately followed by Cary's indignant reaction to the fact that it actually worked.
  • After the moment where Joe lets go of the locket, followed by the ship leaving, the credits continue the sad music... only to cut to show the hilarious movie of the kids, The Case. And then, The Knack's "My Sharona".
• Mook Lieutenant: Overmeyer, Nelec's loyal subordinate.
• Mugged for Disguise: Joe's father has to punch out the soldier guarding him and steal his uniform to pull off Dressing as the Enemy.
• The New Rock & Roll: Parodied a little bit when the Sheriff makes a passing mention (upon finally catching the store clerk's attention) that the Walkman is "pointing down a slippery slope of juvenile distraction".
• Night of the Living Mooks: The Case, the zombie movie the kids are trying to film.
• Noodle Incident: A more grim version: It's never revealed how Joe's mother died, only that it was rather nasty and involved i-beams. A sort of in-story Violence Discretion Shot.
• Non-Malicious Monster: The alien. Note that in this case, "non-malicious" does not equal harmless: All it wants to do is to get home, and if it gets a little hungry while it's waiting and has to eat some of the local wildlife, well, so be it.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: The cure for the zombie virus in The Case.
• Nostalgia Filter: Anybody who was a pre-teen between 1975 to 1985 is gonna get misty-eyed watching this movie.
• Nothing but Hits: "Don't Bring Me Down," "Easy", "My Sharona," "Heart of Glass," and "Silly Love Songs" all show up.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • The classic version is used repeatedly when the monster abducts someone. The third version as well: when Joe and Cary are in the monster's lair, the sheriff's body is right next to them, though you might not spot it until they do. Also, when Alice is abducted, there appears to be something blurry in the background, which starts moving.
  • The attack on the bus is the "Wait for it" version, played straight as an arrow, complete with some poor bastard getting abruptly yanked out of the truck mid-sentence.
  • In the first draft of the script, the alien was never supposed to be shown at all.
  • The train crash scene does this excellently as well. The entire movie-filming scene draws out the tension as much as possible, because the audience just knows there's going to be a train coming down that track. Sure enough, Charles spots one, and scrambles to get everything set up in time to capture it during a take. Then Joe spots a light on the track ahead of the train, and realizes it's a pick-up truck, driving straight towards the train.
• Not Quite Dead: Dr. Woodward after a head-on collision with a train.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Almost no one says "alien". Averted for the actual Z-word in the Show Within a Show short movie The Case.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Despite killing a large number of people throughout the movie, it's made clear that the alien is primarily just trying to feed and/or defend itself, as a carnivorous creature that large would require a huge amount of food to survive. Except for when it has the Colonel cornered in the bus, the creature pauses and looks him dead in the eye, as if savoring the moment, then starts laughing.
• Operation: [Blank]: Operation Walking Distance.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Jackson's stolen Air Force uniform. Everyone from town knows that it's him when he uses it to infiltrate the evacuee center run by the Air Force and he actually has to shush a child who greets him. It works for the soldiers, since the military is, obviously, a very big organization.
• Parental Abandonment: Joe's mother is dead, and his father attempts to send him away to a six week baseball camp over the summer, arguably so he doesn't have to deal with raising Joe by himself.
• Parental Neglect: Both Joe's and Alice's fathers share neglect towards their respective child — Joe's father due to his work and emotional baggage carried from Joe's mother's death, and Alice's father due to his resentment over Alice's mother leaving him and his guilt over Joe's mother's death, which he is indirectly responsible for.
• Pet the Dog: What does the Colonel do in his last few minutes of life? Buy time for the kids to escape from the creature.
• Precision F-Strike: Other characters swear plenty of times, but "fuck" is specifically saved for the perfect moment towards the end:
  Donny: [looking at the wreckage of the bus] What the fuck?!
• Police Brutality: Mild case. Joe's police officer dad strongarms Mr. Dainard into the back of his police car and drives him away, apparently for the crime of... showing up at a wake. Subsequent events explain his motive, though.
• Posthumous Character: Joe's mother.
• Post-Kiss Catatonia: After Joe saves Alice and she hugs him, he looks astonished for a split second, but then hugs her right back.
• Prequel: The comic bundled into the second issue of the Batman: Arkham City comic. Long story short, it's revealed that the alien's ship had been monitoring Earth for quite some time and humans only discovered it with Sputnik; the Russians were scared shitless and so were the Americans, through OSS intelligence. The Russians sent Sputnik 2 (with Laika on-board) to investigate, while the Americans sent a probe of their own, which the alien ship promptly atomized. The U.S. response? A nuclear warhead.
• Product Placement:
  • Budweiser, 7-Eleven, and Kodak are all over the place.
  • The last is more Company Name Placement than Product Placement, of course, as all of the Kodak products shown in this movie have been supplanted by updated versions or discontinued.
• Psychic Link: Humans develop this link with the alien if they are touched by it.
• Punch-Clock Villain: All of the U.S. military personnel under the Colonel's direction.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: At one time, Dr. Woodward was a military research scientist with a top-level security clearance. After he spoke out, he wound up teaching Middle School science classes in a steel-mill town in Ohio.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: When it finds Colonel Nelec's transport bus, let's just say the alien...takes its time.
• Pyromaniac: Cary constantly totes a satchel of fireworks, blows things up at random intervals, and builds his own M80s. Lampshaded when Charles chews him out about his extreme obsession with fireworks.
• Recycled Trailer Music: If the music from this trailer sounds familiar, that's because it was from the movie Cocoon. It can also be heard in this trailer for Cocoon: The Return.
• Red Shirt: The woman with the rollers in her hair and the Sheriff are eaten by the monster in the cave.
• The Reveal: Eventually, the kids find the footage and the recordings that explain what the creature is — an alien who crash-landed years ago who only wanted to rebuild his ship and go home, but government officials got a hold of him first and kept him in captivity for experimentation. The alien did not take this treatment well and therefore was not shy about killing people as he gathered the equipment necessary to rebuild his ship, though it is clear that he eats human beings for sustenance despite being less than fond of them. Though this is a bit ruined if you happened across the prequel comic.
• Rule of Cool: In the train crash scene, the only thing more broken than Woodward's truck are the laws of physics, but most people forgive it on the grounds that Jesus, that's one hell of a train crash.
  Roger Ebert: The train wreck goes on and on and on, tossing railroad cars around like dominoes. You would think a freight car loaded with heavy metals couldn't fly very high into the sky, but you'd be wrong. This is a sensationally good action sequence, up there with the airplane crash in Knowing.
• Rule of Three: The three male zombies in The Case are all played by Cary, who looks exactly the same in all three roles except with a change of clothes.
• Scenery Gorn: The train crash. Explosions, scraping metal, flying train cars, and frightened kids are all captured in full detail to show the massive amount of destruction that takes place.
• Selective Magnetism:
  • The magnetic field at the ends attracts guns, appliances, and even cars, but the military vehicles remain on the ground. Justified in the case of tanks and armored cars, which clearly weigh a lot more than civilian vehicles; done wince-inducingly straight with the metal chain Alice's dad wears around his neck and Cary's braces, which both remain firmly in place while Joe's locket goes floating off into the air.
  • Could be justified: braces might have been made of different material back in the 1970s, but today, dental braces are very rarely magnetic. The metal chain could be a similar example of a non-magnetic metal.
• Serkis Folk: The creature is all motion-capture. Provided by Bruce Greenwood, of all people. Maybe Abrams just likes hanging out with him.
• '70s Hair: Farrah Fawcett hairdos and long sideburns all over the place. However, most of the male kids' hair isn't all that different from 2011 fashions.
• Shoot the Fuel Tank: Deputy Lamb blows up the truck carrying the fuel used to create the "wildfire" that prompted the evacuation to create a distraction for him to make off with a car.
• Shoot the Money: In-Universe example. Alice absolutely nails the first take of her speech to Martin at the train station, but Charles uses the take where she's having to shout to be heard, and all emotion in her dialogue is barely audible, because there's a real train rolling by in the background.
• Shown Their Work:
  • The alien is being transported to Ohio, as seen on the map. Wright-Patterson AFB, the home of the Air Force's Project Bluebook is in Ohio.
  • In fact, if you look closely enough at the two maps that appear in the film, you find that the [fictional] town of Lillian is about twenty miles west of Dayton — the home of the aforementioned Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Woodward's map makes it clear that the train was indeed headed for Wright-Patterson before he intervened.
  • In-universe example: For their age, the kids seem to be pretty well-versed in the process of film-making. Which in the end makes their final product all the more ironic, although for a movie made by kids, it's pretty solid.
• Show Within a Show: Type 1. The Case, the film that the kids are making for the Super-8 Film Festival. Their involvement in the greater plot mostly revolves about being in the right place at the wrong time as they try to film the thing.
• Sickbed Slaying: Done by Nelec to Woodward.
• The Smurfette Principle: Alice Dainard is the only female in a group with five young boys making a film and navigating their way through their adventure. In fact, she's pretty much the only important female in the entire movie, other than Charles' mother and older sister Jennifer.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • To the Spielberg movies of the late '70s and '80s.
  • Stranger Things is considered one to this movie.
• Spoof Aesop: A drive-by line when the kids' driver is too stoned to get out of the car while the town is being blown to smithereens. Charles exclaims, "Drugs are SO bad!" before running away.
• The Stoner: Donny.
• Stuff Blowing Up: The train wreck, to which the crew on board is presumably killed.
• Stylistic Suck: The Case, the zombie movie that the kids are filming, is shown during the credits. It is so bad. Joe in particular is a horrendous actor during his one scene.
• Survivor Guilt: The reason that Alice's father, Louis, initially acted like a jerkass to Joe was because he felt indirectly responsible for Joe's mother's death. Alice even tells Joe that he wished he had died instead of her.
• This Is Gonna Suck: The first two poor bastards the Colonel sends out of the wrecked bus to tag the alien have "I hate my job" written all over their faces.
• Title Drop: It is the name of the film and camera the gang uses and it is the name of the film festival that Charles wants to enter.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: In-Universe. Alice's character as the wife in The Case is just a Sacrificial Lamb, but during rehearsal, Alice acts out the part so emotionally the entire crew is in shock. And then it gets mostly edited out of the film anyway.
• Totally Radical: Justified, as the movie is set in the 1970s, but who really says stuff like "That was mint!" anymore?
• Trauma Swing: The film opens with Joe sitting alone on a swing mourning his mother's death.
• Twice Shy: Once they become friends and form a bond, Joe and Alice become this.
• Tunnel King: The creature is this.
• The Unreveal: The alien's home planet or much of anything about its race.
• Villainous Valor: Nelec's last stand against the alien.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: A few, courtesy of Martin. In the special features, cinematographer Larry Fong notes that this may the first instance of computer-generated vomit in a movie.
• Vomiting Cop: Played with in that the boy who plays the cop in The Case just happens to be the one who keeps barfing.
• We Need a Distraction: One implied, one stated. Joe's dad blows up a tanker truck to provide cover for his escape from custody, and Joe asks Cary to set off some fireworks so they can get out.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Before the end, the creature, when seen, had predatory-looking black eyes, killed people, and for the most part seemed utterly monstrous. When it picks up Joe, after he makes it clear that he understands what happened to it and just wants the creature to leave in peace, the black lids slide back, revealing startlingly intelligent and human-like eyes. It then proceeds to put the boy gently down, lets him and his friends leave, and makes its own exit.
• Women Are Wiser: Downplayed. Alice is the same age as all the boys (14), but since women generally mature faster than men, her greater maturity makes sense. However, she's still shown to be just as emotional, impulsive, and quick to anger as the other teenagers. The only place where she is shown to be completely superior to all of the guys is in the filming of The Case, where she's apparently the only one who has any acting capability whatsoever.
• Would Hit a Girl: Averted. Joe does slap Alice, but hesitantly, and only because it was the only way to wake her up so that they could run for their lives; previously, he kept trying to shake her awake, to no avail.
• X Days Since: A rare non-comedic example. Used at the very start of the film to instantly tragic effect. Joe's mother broke the streak.
• You Look Familiar: In-Universe example. In The Case, Cary plays every single zombie, all of whom get killed by Martin's character, except for when Charles and Alice's characters are infected.
• You Meddling Kids: Subverted. The kids are too scared by the threat of military action to actually do anything about the creature. It's only at the end of the second act when Alice is captured by the creature do the kids actually do anything important to the plot. JJ Abrams even mention on the DVD commentary that he didn't want the kids be the Scooby-Doo gang.
• Your Head Asplode: The Colonel's entire upper torso appears to splatter across the window when the alien bites him.
• You Should Have Died Instead:
  • Alice tells Joe that her father wishes he had died instead of Joe's mother on the day of the accident and sometimes she feels that way about him too. Averted by Joe, who tells her she should never feel that way about her dad.
  • And during the finale when the two fathers are together hunting down their missing kids, Alice's father tries to apologize and admit he should have died instead of Joe's mother. Joe's father, after a few moments of soul-searching, finally says, "It was an accident."

---