Steven Spielberg knows aliens. Though he hasn't made as many UFO-centric movies as you might assume (he's made more movies about WWII than he has about extraterrestrials), the director behind Close Encounters and E.T. clearly knows how to tell a captivating tale about visitors from other worlds. He's doing it again this weekend with Disclosure Day, a movie that happens to come out just a few days after the 15th anniversary of another alien movie, one Spielberg produced but did not direct. Even so, Spielberg's fingerprints are all over J.J. Abrams' 2011 film Super 8, a movie about a visitor from another world. The surprise is that the alien parts of this movie, which are explicitly a homage to '80s Amblin films and Spielberg's alien heyday, are by far the weakest parts of what's otherwise an incredibly rewarding coming-of-age tale.
Set in Ohio in 1979, Super 8 follows 14-year-old Joe (Joel Courtney), whose mother has just died in a freak industrial accident at work. Joe is mourning his mother and trying to make it through with his father, Jack, the local sheriff, played by Kyle Chandler. Jack isn't a bad dad, exactly; he loves his son, but he's struggling as a father during this difficult time. Luckily, Joe has a bunch of close friends led by Charles (Riley Griffiths), a would-be film director with big goals and plenty of confidence. Charles gets Joe and three other friends to make a zombie movie with his Super 8mm camera. When he realizes that the picture needs a romance angle to go along with the (pretty good!) DIY zombie effects, Charles reaches out to Alice. Played by Elle Fanning in one of her breakout leading roles, Alice is surprisingly game to go along with Charles' attempts to be Orson Welles, and she and Joe start getting close. Their relationship is complicated, though, by the fact that Joe's mom died when she went to work on a day off to cover for Alice's father, her co-worker, who was too hungover to make it to the plant.
