Elle Fanning in J.J. Abrams' Spielberg-crazy monster movie "Super 8."
“Super 8″ has been promoted as a film in the spirit of Steven Spielberg’s early popcorn-centric movies, and it definitely has the pedigree. Beyond sporting Spielberg’s name as executive producer, the film is directed by Spielberg obsessive J.J. Abrams (“Lost,” the 2009 “Star Trek”). Abrams is one of many protégés mentored by Spielberg over the past few decades. A quarter-century ago, Spielberg saw Super 8mm films made by Abrams and his childhood friend Matt Reeves (“Cloverfield,” “Let Me In”) and hired them to cut together his own home movies.
No huge shock, then, that “Super 8″ would feel like one-stop shopping for devotees of the filmmaker’s early features — the ones he made before moving into more historically focused or adult-themed work.
What follows is an alphabetized list of Spielberg titles, plot elements, and visual signatures that Abrams invokes in “Super 8.” There are so many that we have surely missed a few; feel free to add others in the Letters section.
MAJOR SPOILER WARNING. This article discusses “Super 8″ in detail. If you haven’t seen it yet and don’t want to know anything about the plot, stop reading now.
“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977) The short list of “CE3K” shout-outs includes the mysterious disappearance of the small town’s canine population plus many humans (an oblique homage to the human abductions in “E.T.”); the military’s cover-up of their attempts to capture the escaped beast, which includes a manufactured forest fire (rather like the phony nerve gas spill at Devil’s Tower); a fleet of mysterious trucks rumbling across the landscape; and constant electrical disturbances in town, caused by the creature’s apparently psychic energy.
Daddy issues. From “E.T.” through “The Last Crusade” up through “Catch Me if You Can” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” most Spielberg movies have them — and “Super 8″ has them, too. Both the hero and the heroine are estranged from their troubled dads and enjoy tearful reconciliations at the end of the story.
“E.T.: The Extraterrestrial” (1982) Spielberg’s early ’80s smash is probably the single biggest influence on Abrams’ new film, thanks to its extraterrestrial-in-the-suburbs plotline, its warm but claustrophobic depiction of middle class family life, and its emphasis on a young boy’s depression over recent trauma. (Elliott in “E.T” is a child of divorce, while the hero of “Super 8″ lost his mom in a steel mill accident.)
But there are other, more specific references. Like Spielberg in “E.T.” — and pretty much any fantasy or horror director with a smidge of common sense — Abrams keeps the “Super 8″ creature shrouded in shadow or strategically hidden by foliage or bits of architecture, then gradually reveals it. But his direction also leads viewers to believe that the creature is brutish and menacing, or at least creepy, even though it is later revealed as highly intelligent and essentially benevolent. (E.T. is nonviolent to his core, but the tormented alien in “Super 8″ has been abused by government scientists since the ’60s, is way pissed about it, and has a right to be.)
The creature’s meticulous construction of a makeshift starship evokes E.T.’s attempts to build a radio with which to call his fellow extraterrestrials and set up a rescue. A wide shot of the town as seen from a wooded ridge is an obvious reference to the famous shots of Elliott’s suburb as seen from the forested hills. And the film’s finale is unabashedly modeled on the end of “E.T.,” with all the major characters coming together near the water tower at the center of the town. The tower is systematically transformed into some sort of nano-technological spacecraft made of secondhand parts. When the ship lifts off, the water tower explodes, drenching the town; it’s Abrams’ version of the farewell rainbow that E.T.’s starship leaves in its wake as it heads home.
The creature’s bond with the renegade scientist, Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman), combines elements of Eliott’s psychic bond with E.T. and the sensitivity and kindness of Peter Coyote’s “Keys” character in the 1982 film, who initially seems menacing but is ultimately revealed as an ally of E.T. and his human pals — kind of a hippie-esque fifth columnist operating within the military-industrial complex.
See also: “Flashlights,” below.
Flashlights or searchlights as harbingers of impending doom. Spielberg has often used the sight of a flashlights or searchlights to induce goosebumps in the audience, which fears whatever forces are behind that beam. Flashlights made their most memorable appearance in “E.T.” (see above). But Spielberg has also deployed bright, probing shafts of light inventively in “Close Encounters (Barry’s abduction), “Schindler’s List” (the Krakow purge sequence) and “War of the Worlds” (throughout) and many other features.
“The Goonies.”(1985)Richard Donner’s 1985 modern pirate movie (executive produced by Spielberg) gives “Super 8″ much of its raucous juvenile energy. Abrams’ amateur filmmakers are a band of young adventurers on a risky secret mission. When they finally enter the creature’s underground lair-cum-workshop, the set is lit and decorated to evoke the pirates’ headquarters in “Goonies,” as well as the Temple of Doom in the second Indiana Jones film and the Lost Boys’ hideout in Spielberg’s 1991 Peter Pan bomb “Hook.”
God’s eye point-of-view shots. “Super 8″ has several moments where the film jumps away from a flurry of action at ground level and shows us a static, high-angle view, with the camera so far up that the image must have been created with miniatures, digital animation or other effects, because no helicopter could hold a shot that still. Spielberg first perfected this type of shot in “Close Encounters” (think of the shadow of the spaceship passing over Richard Dreyfuss’ truck as it drives away from the railroad crossing). But he has used it sparingly but strikingly ever since; one of my favorite examples is the high-angled shot in “The Lost World” that shows the converging patterns caused by terrified humans and pursuing raptors trampling the long grass.
“Gremlins.”(1984) In “Super 8,” character of Dr. Woodward (see the “E.T.” entry, above) is played by Glynn Turman, who played Mr. Hanson, the doomed biology teacher from “Gremlins.” The film was directed by Joe Dante but executive produced by Spielberg.
“Jaws.” (1975) (See “E.T.” above.) Abrams’ gradual revealing of the creature in “Super 8″ follows a pattern perfected by Spielberg in the original 1975 “Jaws” — letting a part or parts of the creature stand in for the whole. In “Jaws,” the shark is initially identified by its fin, the only part visible to humans on the surface. The beast in “Super 8″ is initially treated as an indistinct mass of writhing tentacles or spider legs, then is gradually revealed more fully.
The kids’ mission to rescue a kidnapped member of their amateur film crew — Elle Fanning’s Alice — has echoes of the Orca’s shark hunting expedition, and a couple of the monster attacks are staged in a way that recalls early shark attacks in “Jaws,” especially the opening killing of the female swimmer and the moment where the two ignorant fisherman on the dock are terrorized by the great white.
“Jurassic Park” (1993) and “Jurassic Park: The Lost World” (1997). The action scenes in “Super 8″ are heavily indebted to Spielberg’s first two “Jurassic Park” films, particularly the moments where a menaced person will sort of “disappear” when another character isn’t looking, and the many shots of the creature as seen from a distance, its thunderous motions indicated by the shimmering of treetops and shrubbery and by the violent hurling of wrecked pieces of buildings and machinery. The alien’s climactic attack on a military bus carrying the arrested kids is modeled on the Tyrannosaur attacks in Spielberg’s “Jurassic” movies; there’s even a high-angled tracking shot across the length of the overturned bus that pointedly references the tag-team T-Rex attack in “The Lost World.”
Lens flares. These streaks produced by pointing a camera’s lens straight at a light source were once considered signs that the cinematographer was an amateur; but in the 1960s and ’70s they became artistic flourishes, thanks to such seminal Hollywood films as “Cool Hand Luke.” Spielberg has always dug lens flares, and his early films sported a lot of them. The flares had a distinctively narrow, tapered shape because Spielberg used to film his features with Panavision lenses in anamorphic widescreen, a format that compresses the image during shooting and then unsqueezes it in projection to produce a very wide rectangular frame. Like Abrams’ 2009 film “Star Trek,” “Super 8″ is shot in anamorphic widescreen format, and is unabashedly in love with lens flares and showcases them every chance it gets. Abrams has said in interviews that he adores lens flares and favors lenses that are more likely to produce them.
Storybook skies. The matte-painted or composited nighttime skies in Spielberg’s films have an almost storybook clarity that make them look more illustrated than photographed: vast expanses of deep blue or black, dotted with impossibly bright pinpoint-pricks of starlight. There are many such images in “Super 8,” and their design is so Spielbergian that it’s a wonder that Abrams was able to restrain the urge to add one of Spielberg’s early visual signatures, a shooting star.
Upside-down shots. The disorienting shot from inside the military bus as it’s toppled by the creature may remind viewers of similar trick shots in Spielberg films, particular “Ce3K” and the “Jurassic Park” films, as well as the amazing end of the gas station sequence in “Let Me In,” directed by Abrams’ childhood friend and fellow Spielberg obsessive Matt Reeves.
What are you doing this Sunday? The answer had better be “Watching ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ on continual repeat,” or else we might have a problem. Thirty years ago this weekend, “Raiders” opened in theaters across the country, inspiring children worldwide to think of Harrison Ford as someone other than Han Solo. In honor of the momentous occasion (and the best film of the “Indiana Jones” franchise by far), we found Indy trivia, homages and cultural artifacts that will make your friends’ faces melt off faster than Belloq’s when he opened the ark.
1. Alfred Molina’s cinematic debut
That’s right, the British thespian’s first role wasn’t as Doctor Otto Octavius in “Spider-Man 2″ as so many people believe. A young Molina made his very first appearance on the big screen in 1981, playing Indy’s treacherous sidekick in the opening sequence of “Raiders.” Though he suffers a pretty bad fate in the film, nothing could prepare Molina for his next big American features, ” White Fang 2: Myth of the White Wolf” and Mel Gibson’s update of “Maverick.”
2. “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation”
There may be no bigger Indy fans than Eric Zala, Jayson Lamb and Chris Strompolos, the three Mississippi kids who made a shot-for-shot remake of “Raiders” back in the ’80s for a budget hovering around five grand. (Take that, LucasFilms!) While many great articles have already been written about the “Raiders” adaptation, now would be a good time to go back and check it out. It’s a tribute to the devotion of fan art, above anything else.
3. Highbrow analysis
For those of you who like to read long articles dissecting films after watching them, then the House Next Door’s 2008 article “Smitten With a Whip: Three Appreciations of Indiana Jones“ is the piece for you. Great commentary from three critics with an obvious love for the series (despite “Temple of Doom”), including our own Matt Seitz. From the “Raiders” essay by Odienator:
If someone asks me what was the best time I had at the movies, the answer is, and will always be, the day I saw “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” I read somewhere that every generation gets the James Bond it deserves. For me, that Bond was Roger Moore. Or so I thought. After watching “Raiders” again for the first time in several years, I noticed how much it plays into the conventions of the Bond genre. There’s an opening adventure to establish the hero’s feats of derring-do (though this occurs post-credits sequence), an M-like figure (Denholm Elliott) to assign adventures to the hero, a sidekick (John Rhys-Davies) who occasionally provides local information, spectacular action set pieces with suspenseful last minute escapes, and a feisty woman to add eye candy for the adolescent boys. “Raiders” has all of these, recasting and returning the Bond formula to its earlier, more chaste incarnation in the serials George Lucas loved as a kid.
4. Indiana Bart
Oy, “The Simpsons” and their culture homages. Or spoofs… or whatever you want to call them. All I can say is that if it wasn’t for Homer and the gang, I might have actually been surprised by the iconic scenes in movies like “The Godfather,” “The Shining,” and “Thelma & Louise.” As it was, by the time I was old enough to see those films, I already knew about the horse head, the “All work and no play” typewriter, and the quick stop before the edge of the cliff. (OK, turns out Matt Groening changed up his “Thelma & Louise” ending to make it more kid-friendly.) But one of the greatest movie scenes ever re-created for “The Simpsons” has to be Bart’s escape with Homer’s jar of change in the third-season episode “Bart’s Friend Falls in Love”:
Homer’s incomprehensible shouting at the end makes the scene for me.
5. Bill Murray as Indy?
That’s right. Before Harrison Ford got the role, many other big-name actors were considered for the part, including Tom Selleck (Spielberg’s first choice), Murray, Nick Nolte, Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Jack Nicholson. Murray apparently dropped out because of a “Saturday Night Live” scheduling conflict, but personally… I have a suspicion that Lucas was still pissed about Murray’s “Star Wars” song.
So “Super 8″ is more like a mannered impression of a great ’70s summer movie than the real thing, but that makes it just about perfect for our age of simulated sincerity. It’s an expertly constructed thrill ride with wonderful atmosphere and tremendous good humor; if its heart of gold is artificial, that won’t stop you from enjoying the heck out of it. This much-hyped collaboration between writer-director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg, who have known each other since Abrams was a child, is such a meta-conscious movie-movie fugue state that it goes well beyond concepts like homage or tribute into realms like “demonic possession” or “priestly ritual.”
As you probably know by now, “Super 8″ is a monster movie about a group of small-town kids in 1979 Ohio who are making a monster movie, and I guess it’s that faint touch of postmodernism that makes it not exactly like a Spielberg project that didn’t quite get made 30 years ago. Otherwise, the Spielbergian impersonation is uncannily complete, from the half-disillusioned, half-idealized portrayal of chaotic suburban family life to the secret confraternity of kid culture to the faint stirrings of political correctness to the overdetermined, almost architectural sentimentality of the last act. I kept fighting off the feeling that “Super 8″ had actually been made by, say, Michael Haneke or David Lynch, in an opaque conceptual-art spirit of mockery. Or that some form of illicit horror-movie congress has occurred between director and producer: They merged, like the two women in Bergman’s “Persona.” Or Abrams has eaten Spielberg’s brain and is wearing his skin.
Anyway! Short version of all that: Fun movie, but an odd viewing experience. Across all his film and TV work (“Lost,”“Star Trek,” etc.), Abrams has distinguished himself as an expert craftsman without a distinctive artistic signature, so perhaps it’s fitting that his most autobiographical work is so strongly in another filmmaker’s style. “Super 8″ looks tremendous; it’s a beautiful widescreen picture (complete with presumably intentional lens flares, à la “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”), rich in detail and atmosphere, that captures its “My Sharona” era and small-town setting without overdoing it. (Hearing the Commodores’ “Easy” in the background at some mediocre “fine dining” establishment almost gave me hives.) The cinematographer is Larry Fong, a first-rate young Hollywood talent who shot a lot of “Lost” and made “Watchmen” and “Sucker Punch” with Zack Snyder.
Instead of Spielberg’s Southern California ‘burbs, we’re in the beaten-down, muscle-car-infused Rust Belt town of Lillian, Ohio, where young protagonist Joe Lamb (the screen debut of teen actor Joel Courtney) has just lost his mother in a grotesque industrial accident, as we learn in a wrenching, compact prologue. Joe’s distant, uncommunicative dad, Jackson (Kyle Chandler of “Friday Night Lights”), is a sheriff’s deputy and, fortunately for our story, a darn good one. But he’s not the world’s most empathetic pop; he wants to ship the dreamy and sensitive Joe off to baseball camp for six weeks rather than let him shoot a Super 8 zombie movie with his portly aspiring filmmaker pal, Charles (Riley Griffiths).
All the kid actors in this film are terrific and unaffected performers — seriously, for all the ways that American movies have arguably gotten worse, child acting is way better than it used to be — and Abrams’ script lovingly captures the in-between character of early teen existence. Griffiths and Courtney may get the best scene of all, when they must confront the fact that both of them made the movie mostly so they could get to know the alluring Alice (Elle Fanning), who plays the lead — and then must face a major plot twist seconds later. As for Fanning, everybody who saw her in “Somewhere” or “Reservation Road” or “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” knows what a scary-good actress she has become at a tender age (she’s now 13), and Abrams uses her obvious professionalism and air of being older than the boys around her to killer effect in the movie-within-a-movie here.
I won’t spoil that terrific moment for you, except to say that it’s one of the occasions when some powerful emotion sneaks through the pretty, pop, halfway arch surface of “Super 8.” Oh and yeah, there’s other stuff I’m not supposed to talk about too. Stuff that, by the way, is totally not surprising at all once you understand the movie’s basic setup. Joe and Charles and Alice and the rest of their junior-high moviemaking team head to the town’s railroad depot one summer midnight to shoot a crucial scene, where they miraculously survive (and accidentally record) a horrendous train wreck that seems to have been caused on purpose by their science teacher. When the Air Force appears out of nowhere, led by Noah Emmerich as a standard-issue villainous military spook, and enforces a clampdown on Lillian, it becomes clear there was something on the train that nobody’s supposed to talk about or know about.
If the mystery turns out to be exactly what you think it is — and for all intents and purposes it’s a darker-hued borrowing from Spielberg’s biggest hit — “Super 8″ is definitely about the journey and not the destination. Abrams does an excellent job of withholding precise information about what’s going on in Lillian, and builds an M. Night Shyamalan mood of chaos and menace. All the dogs have fled town. Electrical wire is ripped off power company poles; engines disappear out of cars and microwaves out of appliance stores. There’s a terrifically creepy confrontation between the sheriff and the unknown thingummy at a lonely gas station, complete with excerpts from Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” In a pitch-perfect town meeting, one lady expresses the dominant mode of paranoia: “Unless you can tell me who’s been messing around with our stuff, I think it’s the Soviets.”
Well, no, it might not be the Russkies, but it might just be that a gang of plucky kids obsessed with model-building and George A. Romero movies might be able to solve the mystery and heal the ruptures in the adult world that are tearing Lillian apart. And if there were dangers to be faced and, let’s say, entities to be communicated with and beautiful damsels to be rescued on the way to a conclusion that’s so melodramatic and sentimental and all-out magical that it’s like Spielberg in drag, well, Joe and his buddies might be the guys for that too. Throw in some Keep on Truckin’ posters and a little of “Le Freak” and a range of references that includes 9/11 pre-echoes and the “Phantasm” horror movies and “Stand by Me” and Stephen King’s “It” — there’s nearly as much King in here as Spielberg — and you’ve got a misshapen, lovable monster of a summer good time.
There must be something interesting to say about “Paul,” a low-wattage farce about a weed-smoking alien and his dudely adventures on Earth that stars (and was written by) the British comedy team of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, creators of “Hot Fuzz” and “Shaun of the Dead.” But I’m damned if I know what that would be. “Paul” is unobjectionable enough while you’re sitting there; as a friend of mine used to say about attending poetry readings, it’s better than some TV. But not that much TV. You get the feeling that Pegg and Frost got together with director Greg Mottola (“Adventureland,”“Superbad”), scribbled some half-baked ideas on a napkin — “S&N as nerds, at ComicCon! Genius! Alien = Just a Guy!!! Capt. Kirk vs. the Gorn! Area 51! Rednecks, crazy Christians, gun nuts, 1-eyed chicks, etc.!” — and started shooting the movie as soon as the bong hits had worn off. Or possibly sooner than that.
All three of those guys have made genuinely funny stuff in the past, and I’m particularly a fan of Mottola, who is something like the smarter, more grown-up Judd Apatow (which explains why he’s not rich and powerful). In their better moments, Pegg and Frost have an easygoing Laurel-and-Hardy magic about them, but there’s simply no cure for the fundamental laziness behind “Paul,” which amounts to a recycling program for tired gags about nerds, gays, nervous-nelly Brits, dumbass Yanks and little green men. There’s also no way to vaccinate against its near-fatal dose of Seth Rogen, who voices the eponymous alien — who’s been kept under wraps by the government for 50-odd years — as a chillaxed frat-boy type in ass-hanger shorts, reasonably good company but grating in large doses, and not as smart or funny as he thinks he is. One can only suppose that this movie was in production around the same time as “The Green Hornet,” which probably short-circuited Rogen’s plans for big-screen world domination.
“Paul” operates on one idea and about 35 percent of a second one: When aspiring English comic-book author Clive (Frost) and his illustrator sidekick Graeme (Pegg) stumble upon Paul in the Nevada desert near the secret base long known as Area 51, they find a guy who’s completely adjusted to life on Earth, American-style, but who looks exactly like the stereotypical gray-green half-pint with an oversize head and huge, upward-tilted eyes. That’s because, Paul explains, he’s been covertly influencing pop culture ever since he crash-landed in a Nebraska cornfield in 19-whatever. We hear Paul teleconference with Steven Spielberg (playing himself, in voice-over) and witness him resuscitate a dead starling with surprising results, and those moments are pretty funny, but the hit-to-miss gag ratio is atrocious, and we spend most of the movie hanging out with these borderline-agreeable characters, waiting for something to happen.
OK, since you insist: Graeme and Clive’s RV is pursued by an amped-up government agent (Jason Bateman) and his two buffoonish subordinates (Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio), and along the way our fugitive trio picks up the always-enjoyable Kristen Wiig, playing a one-eyed Christian girl eager to learn how to cuss and fornicate like a proper American. There is a cameo by Sigourney Weaver, for no discernible reason. The fact that we want very much to like Pegg and Frost and Wiig, and that the movie’s execution ranges from indifferent to not-bad, doesn’t make up for the fact that they’re playing second-rate caricatures in a late-night improv sketch that goes on far too long.
”Super 8,” the super-top-secret film collaboration between geek gods J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg finally has a trailer. Hallelujah, Anonymous won’t have to burn the Internet down today. After the sneak peak we got during the Super Bowl, fans have been mobbing the message boards to try to figure out the mystery of what the hell this movie is about. And now we know: it’s “Cloverfield,” but with kids instead of vain 20-somethings, and is also set in the 70s:
Cinemablend wins for summary of the day with their analysis of the trailer: “It’s like a mash-up of Stand By Me plus ET with an evil alien.” The only thing that’s missing from that review is the presence of Kyle Chandler (Coach T!) from “Friday Night Lights,” who has obviously found one very good character role for himself and is settling down nicely in the archetype of the gruff but kind father figure.
So hey you guys, what do you think was on that train that the army is so worried about? I think it’s the giant baby from “Honey I Blew Up the Kid.”
“Growing up, I always knew Dad was somewhere in the Pacific fixing things. He had nothing nice to say about the Navy. He hated the Navy. He hated everybody in the Navy. He had no glorious stories about it.” — Tom Hanks, Time magazine
Despite these dark comments by executive producer Tom Hanks, the first few moments of “The Pacific” (premieres 9 p.m. Friday, March 12, on HBO) feel dangerously weighed down by sentimentality and machismo: We begin with a gentleman lighting a candle in church for his dead mother, then asking a pretty neighbor if he might write to her after he ships off to war. Next, we watch as an officer delivers a valiant speech to his Marines about the importance of the Pacific theater in the war. “We will meet our enemy and kill them all,” he tells them with a heroic growl. After that, we join a family dinner straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, with the sweet, idealistic dialogue to match.
Finally we join our young, hopeful Marines aboard a big gray battleship, gliding toward Guadalcanal.
Marine No. 1: Can someone remind me why we’re here again?
Marine No. 2: We’re here to keep the Japs out of Australia!
(Arguing, then someone asks Pvt. Robert Leckie to speak up.)
Leckie: You want to know why we’re here? “Without a sign, his sword the brave man draws, and asks no omen but his country’s cause.”
Everyone is filled with awed respect for this thoughtful man who can quote Homer, but audiences at home may quickly long for Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line,” in which every war cliché — the brave hero who fights for his country, the fearless leader who calmly guides his men to victory, the beautiful wife who waits faithfully for her darling husband back home — is blown out of the water with startling grace. Based on James Jones’ novel about his experiences in Guadalcanal, “The Thin Red Line” is a brilliant intersection of art film and war film, pairing breathtaking footage of clouds and sunlight dancing across the grass with soldiers dropping dead from bullets zipping out of nowhere, or interspersing a thoughtful man’s search for meaning among the native tribes of the South Pacific with his painfully visceral experiences of war.
Somehow Malick’s soaring, melancholy portrayal of the Battle of Guadalcanal forces itself into the frame when watching “The Pacific,” not just because the subject and source material are the same (“The Pacific” is also based, in part, on James Jones’ novel) but also because Malick’s $52 million film underscores the relative shortcomings of the $250 million HBO miniseries. Both works focus on the dramatic toll that this chapter of WWII history took on the souls of the men involved, but where Malick brought the immense sorrows of war to life with breathtaking lyricism, originality and imagination, executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and writer Bruce C. McKenna offer us their signature brand of straightforward storytelling.
Sure, their style worked just fine in the 2001 HBO miniseries “Band of Brothers” (about WWII in Europe), and it does the job here. The battle scenes are suspenseful and riveting, the dialogue is reasonably sharp, and the story advances at the same pace as the war itself did: There are harrowing nights on the battlefield that will make you grit your teeth in fear, and then there are months where our Marines — who, except for two main characters, are difficult to distinguish from each other until a few hours into the series — meander along trying to sort out the reason and purpose for this fresh hell. All of which is well and good, but if you’re hoping for that extra bit of dramatic flair, if you’re expecting one or two unusual choices, a little innovation, some imaginative filmmaking? You won’t find it here.
Yes, our heroes do take a terrible fall from the sweet, bow-tied, red-lipsticked beginning of our story. The jungles of Guadalcanal, by all accounts, left no man’s sense of optimism and belief in the glory of battle intact. But even after that, the lead characters find more to hope for: a little R&R in Australia, some love from an Australian girl, idyllic scenes where our boys bask in the sunlight all the while dreading their next deployment. Slowly, though, the grueling years of war take a toll on these lives: We can see it in the expressions of Robert Leckie (James Badge Dale), who seems so confident and optimistic at the start, but grows grimmer with each passing trauma and disappointment. Then there’s Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello), a privileged kid whose doctor father tries to keep him from enlisting for as long as he can. These and all of the other characters in “The Pacific” are sketchy and incomplete at best. Mostly, we see their romantic notions chipped away by the cruel realities of war.
But do we feel what they feel? When they’re fighting, we do. The battle scenes of “The Pacific” vibrate at a higher frequency and pull us into the darkness, crouching behind our rattling guns, our hands shaking in fear.
But in the slow moments, “The Pacific” doesn’t mesmerize us in quite the same way. Quiet, subtle scenes require much more from our storytellers. To pull viewers into such lulls in the action, to make us feel the longing and frustration and loneliness that these men felt when bullets weren’t buzzing through the air, when the sound of a bird chirping or the sight of a young girl picking tomatoes in her parents’ backyard could break their hearts? “The Pacific” fails at this task. We don’t understand these men, and the lulls between battle scenes feel like just that: lulls. This makes the battles themselves, while impressive, far less visceral. The stakes aren’t high for us, because we don’t care enough about these men.
Back in 1999, Terrence Malick was a best director Oscar nominee for “The Thin Red Line,” but Steven Spielberg won for “Saving Private Ryan,” which, despite that first incredible, heart-stopping scene at Normandy, trudged slowly over the same old hero clichés and tear-jerky landscapes we’ve seen in every war movie ever made. Now, here are Spielberg and Hanks 11 years later, teamed up again to draw out a far less nuanced, far less riveting portrayal of the Pacific theater than Malick gave us back then. If you adored “Saving Private Ryan” and “Band of Brothers” (I enjoyed but didn’t love both), then “The Pacific” is well worth your time. But if you’re sometimes left cold by the epic films that others gush over, if you’re often lukewarm on Spielberg and expect more from a war movie than just realistic battle scenes, then I would skip the 10 hours of viewing time and rent “The Thin Red Line” instead. Turn down the lights, sit close to your biggest, best TV set, and give the movie your full attention. It may be the best war film ever made, and it will break your heart in two.
As unfair as it may seem to compare “The Pacific,” a TV miniseries, to “The Thin Red Line,” a film by one of this country’s most celebrated directors, considering the talent and the millions of dollars that went into both, the comparison feels not only fair but unavoidable. “The Pacific” is a well-made war series. But as Malick and Jones understood like no one else, war isn’t just a story told in chronological order, with characters who struggle with right and wrong, good and bad. War is pure madness. Without a spirit of madness infused in it, a war story doesn’t come close to touching war’s dark glimpses into the human soul.
Elle Fanning in J.J. Abrams' Spielberg-crazy monster movie "Super 8." 
Snakes! He hates snakes! 
Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney in "Super 8" 
A still from "Paul" 
E.T., phone home? 
A still from "The Pacific" 
