Super 8

J.J. Abrams’s 2011 film starts with kids shooting their own zombie picture in a small Ohio town in 1979, witnessing a night derailment. The premise is autobiographical. As teenagers, Abrams and Matt Reeves entered a Super 8 festival in Los Angeles; after a newspaper piece, Spielberg’s assistant Kathleen Kennedy asked them to repair the splices on the films Spielberg shot at their age, Firelight and Escape to Nowhere. Abrams has said the second act took forever to structure, the difficulty being fitting a coming of age story and a monster movie into one shape. The crash is not what it looks like. What was built on set was the aftermath, not the collision; the carriages, the impact and most of the fire are computer work by ILM and Scanline, the children placed into the frame afterwards. The hardest shot sends the train left to right while its compression wave travels back past the kids right to left. Separate versions were made for the teaser, so the film replays those moments from the kids’ viewpoint. Anamorphic lenses were used deliberately, and ILM measured each so the distortion could be put back over the digital elements. A good fit if you treat the zombie short under the end credits as the finale. Not for anyone who wants that derailment staged for real.