You might imagine that writer/director J.J. Abrams was wearing a “WWSD” (“What Would Spielberg Do?”) bracelet throughout the production of Super 8, which effectively harkens back to the good ol’ days of the Reagan era when each summer movie season promised a new Spielberg-directed or -produced adventure yarn, whether it be Indiana Jones swashbuckling in pursuit of a religious artifact, or the Goonies searching for pirate treasure in order to save their beloved neighborhood from developers.

Unlike so many of today’s impersonal digital blockbusters, Spielberg’s ’80s greatest hits had character and personality, not to mention an often deft blending of humor and horror. (Remember that gross-out dinner in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? How about the gremlin in the juicer in Gremlins?). Abrams, who at the time was best known for creating the cult TV series Alias and Lost and rebooting the Star Trek franchise, had long been an heir apparent to Spielberg (who had two films coming out later that year), and having Spielberg officially brand Super 8 with his producer credit all but sealed the deal. And, while Super 8 is a fun reworking of the old 1950s science fiction trope of teenagers saving the day from marauding aliens while adults (e.g., the Establishment) fumble around and generally make things worse, that effervescent, magical touch that Spielberg gave to his best productions eludes Abrams. As good as it is, Super 8 feels more like an impersonation of Spielbergian cinema rather than an elaboration.

As the title suggests, Super 8 is set in the pre-digital era of 1979, when Walkmans (a personal stereo!) were a new technology, Walter Cronkite was still on the air, and budding young filmmakers made their backyard masterpieces on 8mm film (not surprisingly, this is how both Abrams and Spielberg first indulged their love of cinema). The story takes place in a small, industrial town in Ohio where 13-year-old Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) lives with his recently widowed father, Jackson (Kyle Chandler), who is one of the town’s deputies. Joel’s mom was killed in an industrial accident, which Abrams poignantly depicts via the film’s opening shot of a worker solemnly replacing the number on a massive “Days Since Our Last Accident” sign in the middle of a steel plant. Joe’s best friend is Charles (Riley Griffiths), a gregarious would-be filmmaker who is midway through production on a ramshackle zombie movie called The Case, which he hopes to enter in an amateur film festival. Charles has recruited all of his friends to play roles in front of and behind the camera: Joe does make-up, Martin (Gabriel Basso) plays the lead role of a private detective, and Cary (Ryan Lee) plays the various zombies and provides lighting and explosives via his vast arsenal of fireworks (the frequent suggestion that Cary is a budding pyromaniac gives him an amusingly dark edge). The only female member of the group is Alice (Elle Fanning), an icy blonde on whom Joe has an obvious crush even though her father, Louis (Ron Eldard), is at serious odds with Joe’s dad.

The story takes a turn when Charles, Joe, Alice, and the rest of the motley film crew are shooting a scene after midnight at a deserted train depot and witness the spectacular derailing of a military train carrying mysterious cargo. The train was purposefully derailed by their science teacher, Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman), who drove his truck directly into the oncoming locomotive (and implausibly lived in order to dispense important narrative information). The next day the town is swarming with military, led by the no-nonsense Colonel Nelec (Noah Emmerich), whose evasive answers and refusal to cooperate with local authorities signals a major cover-up. Soon, mysterious things start happening: Every dog in town takes off for the hills while car engines, microwaves, and other electronic devices start disappearing, as do various townspeople, some of whom we see snatched up by a giant, unseen behemoth that clearly escaped from the train and is now lurking on the outskirts of town. Meanwhile, the teen crew continues trying to make their movie, as Charles, ever the prescient and opportunistic showman, realizes that all the weird happenings are providing his movie with that most crucial of elements: “production value!” Super 8, of course, has plenty of production value itself, although Abrams wisely holds back most of the special effects until the film’s second half.

The various mysteries in Super 8 are eventually resolved, and once they are, the story is revealed to be a surprisingly simple retooling of some basic paranoid science fiction tropes. There is plenty of intrigue as the mystery unfolds, even though some of Abrams’s mechanisms for relating important information are nearly as clumsy as what we would expect the kids to do in their Super 8mm home movie (which we get to see in its finished state during the closing credits). Nevertheless, the film still works because the teen characters are so inviting and fully formed, not to mention amusingly gregarious and sometimes silly-raunchy in a way that recalls the original Bad News Bears (1976), minus the racism.

Joe is clearly a “little boy lost” in the mold of E.T.’s Elliott, albeit several years older and without the pent-up anger, and Charles is a funny amalgam of all of moviedom’s chubby pranksters mixed with the intensity of cinematic commitment that we imagine launched both Abrams and Spielberg on their career trajectories. The period detail is both exquisite and fun in its evocation of the waning days of the Carter years, whose aesthetic ugliness in everything from wallpaper to clothing now exudes a peculiar charm that can be found nowhere else. For children of that era (myself included), it’s a wonderfully nostalgic throwback, essentially reworking the question that George Lucas asked in American Graffiti (“Where were you in ’62?”) and adding some monster mayhem that doesn’t completely eliminate the possibility of a Close Encounters climax of awe-inspiring melding with the cosmos.

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