Hey, Guys, Let’s Make a Monster Flick

There is something odd about watching a movie called “Super 8” digitally projected onto an Imax screen with 12,000 watts of gut-rumbling Dolby sound. J. J. Abrams, the writer and director and presiding pop-culture guru-geek, is surely aware of the incongruity. You might even say that it’s the subject of the movie, which makes much of the technological gap between the present day and 1979, when this story of kids and monsters takes place.

Back then, as Mr. Abrams and other Gen-X lost boys turned middle-aged nostalgia fetishists will recall, there were no cellphones or camcorders, and we got our news from a man named Walter Cronkite. Young people used walkie-talkies and built models, and if you shot a movie with your friends, you had to edit it by cutting and splicing by hand. The fastest the film could be developed was three days.

The slower, more cumbersome gadgetry of the predigital past provides “Super 8” with some clever jokes and plot twists. In one scene a small-town sheriff is heard muttering about this newfangled contraption called a Walkman, which points down a “slippery slope” of juvenile distraction. Everyone watching — or texting in the theater — will get a chuckle out of that: the 13-year-olds of 2011 and also those who turned 13 in the summer of 1979, a category that happens to include both Mr. Abrams and the present critic, as well some important characters in the film.

Remember Three Mile Island? Remember “My Sharona”? Remember CB radios? Remember Blondie and disco? Mr. Abrams certainly does, and he evokes that bygone world with a sense of period detail that sits right on the line between uncanny and neurotic. His 1979 is more like 1979 than the real 1979, which hardly seemed like a time of innocence and eager wonder.

But no time ever does, except in retrospect, and “Super 8” attempts the difficult feat of balancing self-consciousness about the olden days with wide-eyed, headlong, present-tense fun. For about an hour it succeeds marvelously. The modest letdown that follows exposes the limitations of Mr. Abrams’s imagination. He is clever and sincere — a generous showman, as his work on television series like “Lost” and “Alias” has frequently shown — but still, at least on the big screen, more student than master. Like his previous features, “Mission: Impossible III” and “Star Trek,” “Super 8” is an enticing package without much inside.

Inescapable comparisons to Steven Spielberg (a producer of “Super 8” and something of a mentor to Mr. Abrams) are apt, but they go only so far. Themes of childlike resistance to authority and intergalactic compassion are evident here, as they were in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.” The visual and emotional poetry of those films, however, never quite blossoms, despite having been copied out carefully, line by line.

Still, “not as good as E.T.” is not so bad. (“Better than ‘Thor’ or ‘X-Men: First Class’ ” may be a more relevant judgment at this moment in the history of air-conditioning.) You know that, in the homestretch, big battles will be fought, lessons will be learned, the elusive monster will be revealed and other loose ends will be tied up. You may wish it did not all happen in such a perfunctory, predictable way. The machinery of genre, in other words, so ingeniously kept to a low background hum for so long, comes roaring to life, and the movie enacts its own loss of innocence. “Super 8” turns out, the way many of us turn out, not to be so special after all.

Until, as the closing credits roll, Mr. Abrams reminds you of its origins and of what it might have been. What you see — I’m not spoiling anything, just advising you not to leave your seat too soon — is a final cut of the Super-8 movie whose making has framed and punctuated the action of “Super 8.” The auteur is a roly-poly teenager named Charles (Riley Griffiths), who lives with a gaggle of siblings in a ranch-style house in Lillian, a steel town in southern Ohio.

The main character in Mr. Abrams’s film is not Charles but his best friend, Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), who serves as makeup artist on “The Case,” a zombie picture Charles hopes to enter in a regional film festival. Joe’s mother was recently killed in an accident at the steel mill, a loss that shadows both the boy’s relationship with his father (Kyle Chandler), a sheriff’s deputy, and with Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning), whose father (Ron Eldard) seems to have had something to do with the death.

Alice joins the cast of “The Case,” activating Joe’s crush on her and setting up the best moment in both that movie and “Super 8,” a scene in which Ms. Fanning and her character, in different ways, demonstrate their impressive acting chops. The rest of Mr. Abrams’s young cast — including Gabriel Basso as an anxious nerd, Ryan Lee as a pint-size pyromaniac and Zach Mills as another anxious nerd — is almost as good. Running around with them, on bikes and in cars they have no business driving, is the movie’s greatest pleasure.

In the course of their carefree, intensely serious pursuit of cinematic distinction some weird stuff starts to happen. A train derails after crashing into a pickup truck driven by a science teacher (Glynn Turman). And then a bunch of sinister military guys show up, led by Colonel Nelec (Noah Emmerich). Cars start flying through the air. Dogs go missing, and people too. And the young filmmakers vacillate between fear, fascination and opportunism. All the mayhem is, for Charles, a source of “production values.”

Mr. Abrams is good at those, and at balancing big effects with smaller-scale, real-world touches. Somehow, though, while he admires the seat-of-the-pants spirit of his fledgling cineastes, he is too careful and dutiful a filmmaker to embrace it. What “Super 8” lacks — and what “The Case” has — is a sense of improvisation, of risk, of the wild and giddy rush that accompanies the decision to pay tribute to the movies you love by going out and making one yourself. It gives us everything we want, except awe, amazement and a feeling of discovery.

“Super 8” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some adolescent swearing, a bit of drug use and tactfully handled violence.

SUPER 8

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Written and directed by J. J. Abrams; director of photography, Larry Fong; edited by Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey; music by Michael Giacchino; production design by Martin Whist; costumes by Ha Nguyen; produced by Steven Spielberg, Mr. Abrams and Bryan Burk; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes.

WITH: Kyle Chandler (Jackson Lamb), Elle Fanning (Alice Dainard), Joel Courtney (Joe Lamb), Gabriel Basso (Martin), Noah Emmerich (Nelec), Ron Eldard (Louis Dainard), Riley Griffiths (Charles), Ryan Lee (Cary), Zach Mills (Preston) and Glynn Turman (Dr. Woodward).