Joe Lamb lost his mother in a tragic workplace accident. In the aftermath of her death, he retreats into the world of amateur movie making with a gang of friends that’s reminiscent of the great kid-adventure movies of the 1980s (The Goonies and ET in particular). His friends go to rather extensive lengths to shoot their movie, a story about a detective investigating zombies. While out on a shoot, they become witnesses to a train accident. Their camera keeps rolling as the train crashes into a pickup truck, explodes, derails, and unleashes destruction on the whole area. Somehow, all the kids emerge unscathed (this is Spielberg, after all). They dig out the camera and explore the wreckage, discovering that the driver of the pickup is still alive. He wheezes a warning with his last breath. “Do not speak of this,” he says, “or you and your parents will die.”
Moments later, military personnel swarm onto the scene, and the kids speed off into the night, terrified and confused. In the days that come, a mysterious creature begins snatching bodies, stealing metal parts from cars and home appliances, scaring away dogs, and ripping down telephone wires.
Super 8 is a wonderful throwback. The community of friends surrounding Joe Lamb are hilarious and endearing, and each of their quirks ends up being an essential part of the story. Joe’s crush, Alice, is the daughter of the man responsible for the death of Joe’s mom, and their fathers bitterly hate one another, banning the children from being friends. It’s a riff on Romeo and Juliet (with more innocence . . . and more aliens).
Spoiler Alert
What’s striking about the movie is its climax. So let me encourage you to stop reading if you haven’t seen the movie and plan to. You don’t want to know what’s ahead.
Okay . . . I warned you.
Eventually we learn that the creature released in the train crash is an alien captured by the Air Force, who tortured and experimented on him for years in an attempt to gain an understanding of his advanced technology. (Imagine if the air force had captured ET, and when he escaped, he was REALLY mad.) When the train transporting him and the elements of his ship derails, he seizes the moment to escape and begins stealing bits of cars, wires, and hardware to piece together a makeshift ship. The mysterious Dr. Woodward had been part of the experiments and deliberately derailed the train out of compassion for the creature, in hopes that he could finally escape.
The Air Force, in an attempt to flush out the alien, sets a fire that will engulf the town and evacuates all of its inhabitants. Right at that moment, the kids watch the freshly developed Super 8 film and see the creature for the first time. Shortly after, we discover that Alice has been taken by the alien, and the kids must return to the now-evacuated (and swarming with military) town in order to rescue her. The scene is bedlam with tanks and military personnel everywhere. Somehow the alien has caused all their weapons to begin randomly misfiring, and the kids dart through a war zone looking for Alice.
Interesting Imagery
Here’s where the imagery gets interesting. Joe remembers seeing some commotion at the graveyard where his mother is buried, in a garage at the center of the cemetery. He and a friend break into the garage to discover that the alien has burrowed deep underground and built a network of tunnels that stretches under the town. He’s been collecting all the bits of car parts and microwaves here, experimenting and working to rebuild his ship. The boys find Alice and several others still alive, break them loose from spider-like webs, and begin looking for a way out.
Suddenly, they’re confronted with the alien, and Joe courageously steps between the alien and the others. He tells the alien that he knows that it just wants to go home, and he encourages it just to go. The alien picks up Joe and holds him before his own massive, terrifying face. “Sometimes bad things just happen,” Joe says.
The alien’s snake-like eyes shift, opening a second pair of eyelids, revealing eyes that are sad and human looking. Joe and the alien find solidarity in their pain, and the alien sets Joe down, turns, and disappears into the tunnels. The kids climb out and run back towards town, reuniting with family and friends who are desperately searching for them.
In the distance, noise begins coming from a water tower. Earlier in the film, we’d seen that something was happening there, and now the reason begins to come together. A massive magnetic force begins to draw everything metal towards the tower: bikes, cars, TVs, tanks—-you name it. Once they reach the tower, they begin to melt and morph, taking the shape of the alien’s ship. Just as the form begins to solidify, the force pulls a necklace from Joe’s pocket. It’s a locket his mother used to wear containing a picture of her with him. It’s also a symbol of Joe’s loss, his loneliness, and his fear. He grabs it out of midair and fights to keep his grip, but suddenly, his expression changes. He looks one last time into the photo inside and lets it go. As it reaches the water tower, the tower bursts, sending an explosion of water raining down on the onlookers, and sending the alien’s ship off into the heavens.
Redemptive Themes
I was struck by many redemptive themes in the film. One could talk about the power of community, the beauty of courage, and the power of forgiveness. But most profoundly, this is a movie about suffering and redemption.
The Alien
The alien is the victim of great injustice in the film. Captured, tortured, and exploited for years, his suffering turned him violent, into a dark, shadowy beast snatching up bodies and leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. Dr. Woodward’s compassion emerged only when the beast grabbed him one day in the lab (many years earlier). The alien has telepathic power, and when he touched Woodward, the doctor understood that the alien was crushed, and longed for home.
The Fathers
Joe and Alice’s fathers also suffer. Joe’s dad is suddenly alone, having lost his wife. In one scene, Joe finds him weeping in the bathroom, and his father can’t bear for his son to see. Alice’s father, a chronic and abusive alcoholic, suffers not only from addiction, but also from abandonment. In a fight with Alice, he tells her to leave, just like her mother did. The loneliness and isolation of these men have turned them inward, and their interactions with Joe and Alice are harsh. They keep their children at arms’ length and use anger to hide their pain. In the one scene where Joe’s father is found weeping, he sends Joe away, slams a door, and pulls himself together.
Joe
Joe’s suffering started when he was young. He carries it around like the necklace he keeps in his pocket, and the effect he will allow it to have on his future is unclear.
Some people suffer alone, grow embittered, and turn that suffering into ammunition to wound others. It causes a festering bitterness, and they strike with violence upon anyone who steps close to them. The beast’s violence and volatility is a metaphor for the kind of festering violence in the soul of one who suffers alone.
Joe and Alice find one another in the midst of their own suffering, and the connection gives them power to help one another. When Alice first sees Joe’s necklace, he shoves it back in his pocket, anxious to hide his wound, but when he finally lets her in, he’s comforted, and they’re bonded.
His confrontation with the beast brings this into sharp focus. As he’s snatched up by the beast, he doesn’t respond to violence with violence or hate, but with compassion. There’s solidarity. Empathy. And a strange kind of healing.
There’s another set of images that run parallel to these scenes of suffering and compassion. To rescue Alice, Joe goes to a graveyard, descends into a tomb, and rises again. It’s classic death and resurrection imagery, climaxing in the moment when the water tower bursts and the town is washed as the beast blasts away. It’s a clear (and perhaps deliberate) gospel parallel. Descending into the tomb, Joe faces death and suffering, and rises again. When he releases the locket to float off to the water tower, it’s a release from suffering. It’s not that suffering no longer is painful; it’s that suffering will no longer be all-powerful. At that moment, the beast blasts away, his fearsome presence cast away like the goat in the wilderness.
Following this logic, we could imagine the whole story as figurative. The death of Joe’s mother begins to create the seeds of bitterness between Joe and his father, a slow-simmering tension that grows into this dark monster they can’t seem to overcome. The train wreck is the emotional impact of the death, and the monster is the hell released inside of their souls in the light of death’s reign. The graveyard/water tower sequence is a baptism metaphor, whereby descending into the grave and rising again, Joe can move on, his enemy (the bitterness of suffering) is cast off into another galaxy (as the alien soars away), and he’s washed clean.
True to Life
How true to life this story is. The slightest suffering in our lives creates roots of bitterness, and truly deep suffering (the loss of our health, or the loss of a friend) can send us spiraling down a monstrous path, severing our relationships and leaving us embittered and solitary figures.
Yet we worship a God who deliberately took on such suffering on our behalf, bearing a burden we couldn’t possibly endure, and through it, releasing us from the bondage we deserved. He descends into the tomb where we’re trapped—-not as a disinterested outsider, but as one who’s suffered with us and for us, leading us out and casting away the beast that holds us prisoner.
Death looms like a monster. Sin and suffering will corrupt our souls and turn them dark while our hearts yet beat. But the gospel arrives with the stark news that we (first of all) deserve no better than our suffering; our sins are part of a broken universe, and condemnation is richly deserved. But (second of all) God has entered that universe, suffered with us and for us, and cast away our sins as far from us as the galaxy toward which the alien sails away at the end of Super 8. In the new order that Jesus establishes, we’re not defined by the pain and suffering that punctuates our days. Instead, we’re defined by his own journey into the grave, where he found us, revived us, and led us back home.
Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?
In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
