The trailer for Fox’s new fall series Revolution--created by J.J. Abrams--depicts a bizarre future world wherein all forms of electricity have ceased to function. Perhaps stranger yet is the show’s prediction of a future sports outcome: a brief shot at 2:26 of an overgrown Wrigley Field features a sign reading “2012 World Series Champions.” Which is more likely--the Cubs winning it all this year or airplanes falling from the sky and our regression to an agrarian society?

Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning and Ron Eldard.

The summer vacation doldrums are here, providing I.Q. challenges to moviegoers of all ages, but for adolescents with a lot of free time on their hands, Super 8 promises something extra.

It’s the work of  J.J. Abrams, the slam-bam hack writer-director of such junk as Star Trek and Mission Impossible 3 (OK, he also wrote the nifty, nail-biting road thriller Joy Ride, which I liked a lot), but this time the producer is Steven Spielberg, so you have a right to expect something with a bit more quality. Sorry to dash your hopes, but it’s just more of the same junk.  Junk for children, with an estimated $45-million budget. There oughta be a law.

The premise is simplicity itself. In the summer of 1979, six school chums in a small steel-mining town in Ohio decide to make a zombie movie with a hand-held 8-mm. camera to enter in a Cleveland film competition. A smart, imaginative kid named Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), wise beyond his years like Henry Thomas in E.T., does lights, monster makeup and special effects. Joe has recently lost his mother in a mining accident, but despite the  bravery and can-do attitude that make him a leader among the others, he still carries around his late mom’s locket for good luck. He also harbors a secret crush on Alice (Elle Fanning), who objects to working with Joe because his father (Kyle Chandler, who plays the football coach on the popular TV series Friday Night Lights) is the deputy sheriff who arrested her father for drunkenness at Joe’s mother’s funeral. In fact, both Joe and Alice have been forbidden to continue working on their little home movie, which their fathers consider a frivolous waste of time, but secretly continue, disobeying orders and sneaking out at night when their Dads aren’t home. This is easier than it sounds, since zombie movies are all night scenes anyway, right?

But one night while filming at the depot, they accidentally witness a spectacular train crash (and we witness some spectacular special effects that get the movie off to a breathtaking start). Out of the wreckage, a man warns: “Do not speak of this or you and your parents will die.” Good advice. Because, wouldn’t you know, an alien from outer space also emerges. This is no cuddly E.T., but a monolithic monster capable of destroying everything in its path, and it’s hopping mad. Automobile transmissions fail, generators die, all of the pets in town disappear, telephone wires vanish, water and electricity are on the fritz—and the kids caught it all on their Super 8! It’s all the result of some evil plan, natch, cooked up by the U.S. Air Force, in a secret military operation to imprison and study a master race from another planet… but never mind. You needn’t concern yourself about things like plot, character development, and science. Better to just let the charm and resourcefulness of the six kids take over, enjoy the sci-fi effects that appear at the beginning and end of the movie, and be grateful for small favors.

This movie is divided into two halves: the movie within the movie, and the stuff about the monster destroying the town that only the kids can save. The best thing about Super 8, by far, are the kids, all perfectly cast. The script does a much better job making them believable and real than the adults. The funniest parts of the movie center on the process of filming their zombie epic. Cary (Ryan Lee) is the one who likes to set fires and blow things up. Martin (Gabriel Basso) is the dashing leading man who bursts into tears when real danger threatens. Best of all, there is director Charles (Riley  Griffiths), the overweight, tyrannical Orson Welles of the pack, weaned on cheesy B-movie monsters-and-mayhem thrillers, who doesn’t care what calamities occur as long as the camera keeps rolling. Watching these youngsters following their dream against all odds, I found myself getting some of my inner child back and laughing out loud at the same time. The rest of the movie steals shamelessly from Alien, The Thing, and every other space visitor flick ever made, including Spielberg’s own Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It takes forever, but when we finally come face to face with the actual monster, it’s as silly as it is enigmatic—rolling its eyes like Casper the Friendly Ghost while sucking air-conditioners and toaster ovens into a heap like a walking garbage dump! Turns out he’s just homesick, and all it takes to calm him down is Joe’s locket. He’s no E.T. but he still understands “Go home.” By that time, I could hardly wait myself.

rreed@observer.com

SUPER 8

Written and directed by J.J. Abrams

Starring Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, AJ Michalka

2/4

Don't laugh: the field of nominees seems to have been expanded to 10 for the express purpose of allowing these mainstream movies into the party. However, while you've most certainly heard rumblings of an Oscar campaign for Up—Disney is already running "For Your Consideration" ads in Variety—the Oscar buzz on J.J. Abrams' Star Trek has been decidedly muted. And to that we say: why? Under no metric should Up be considered any more viable than Star Trek as a Best Picture nominee. It seems the only thing holding Star Trek back is the perception that it is somehow a less legitimate contender. Well, allow us to throw dirt in the face of that notion. The Oscar campaign for Star Trek starts right here!

The critics loved Star Trek, too!

Disney is fond of calling Up the "best reviewed movie of the year." True story! Up has a 98 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning it ranks alongside The Hurt Locker as the best widely reviewed movie of 2009 thus far. But Star Trek's 95 percent rating is nothing to sneeze at either. And did you know that Star Trek actually has more positive notices than any other movie released in 2009 (260 positives reviews to Up's 241)? Whether or not critics hedged when reviewing Star Trek—many reviewers seem fond of taking the "it succeeded in what it set out to accomplish" track for summer blockbusters—is irrelevant. Couldn't you see Paramount unleashing an ad campaign calling Star Trek the "film more critics loved than anything else?" At the very least, it has the added bonus of being truthful.

It wouldn't be the first entertaining blockbuster to get a nomination!

Rocky. Jaws. The Towering Inferno. Star Wars. Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Fugitive. Gladiator. Just because The Dark Knight wasn't nominated for Best Picture doesn't actually mean that the Academy wholesale ignores beloved blockbusters. There is precedent for Star Trek to get a nomination, and not just because it was basically a rip-off of Star Wars.

When you think about it, Star Trek isn't any sillier than Up!

Sure, Star Trek featured such ridiculous things as Romulans, red matter, a time-traveling Spock and Tyler Perry in a reasonless cameo appearance. However, did everyone forget the premise of Up: that an old man uses thousands of balloons to fly his house to a distant fantasy land inhabited by talking dogs and giant, possibly gender-bending, birds? This is to take nothing away from the beauty that was Up, but more to illustrate that when it comes to Oscar movies, believability doesn't matter a whole bunch. Call us old fashioned, but championing one of these and not the other seems slightly disingenuous. Here's hoping there's room for both come nomination time.

One of the more successful new shows of the past year, Fringe had found a comfortable home on Tuesday night thanks in part to a gigantic lead-in audience from American Idol and little competition on other networks. Now though, if ABC, CBS and NBC keep their Thursday lineups intact, most viewers won’t even be able to record Fringe on their DVR—assuming it’s already filled up with those other Thursday night shows . Talk about a scheduling conflict! We hope Fringe fans are prepared to watch the show on Hulu.

To give Mr. Reilly some credit, we can at least see the method to this madness. Fact is, CSI is ripe for a takedown and the fresh take Fringe puts on the procedural genre will, in theory, allow it to survive by taking viewers away from sputtering CBS warhorse—CSI's season finale was down 31 percent from last year. But that thinking doesn’t seem to account for the fact that Fringe’s audience skews much younger than CSI's and runs smack into Grey’s Anatomy and The Office/30 Rock. And while Fringe is a solid hit—the first season averaged around nine million viewers per episode—it doesn’t seem like the type of player that can survive against the likes of Grey’s Anatomy, no matter how ridiculous that series gets (see: ghost sex). Lest we forget, the last time Fox took a solidly performing freshman series and moved it to Thursdays to take on CSI and Grey’s, it was The O.C., and that was off the air two seasons later. If Mr. Reilly was looking for a way to get his brother-in-arms, Mr. Silverman, out of the headlines, he’s done so. But not to worry: with NBC set to announce their official fall schedule later today, the diversion shouldn’t last very long.

Frankly, we weren’t that surprised by any of this. Mr. Abrams has said, many a time, that he was never a big fan of Star Trek. But, Star Wars? The guy loves it! And, in lieu of getting the rights from 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm to re-create his beloved film (expect this to happen around the same time Wanda Sykes and Rush Limbaugh go out for drinks together), it seems that Mr. Abrams jumped at the chance to visit a galaxy far, far away, any way he could. Still not convinced? Take a look at these three key scenes from Star Wars and how they compare to the Star Trek. (And there are more where these came from.) Beware though: spoilers afoot!

“No, Alderaan is peaceful, you can't possibly …”

In Star Wars: Led by Darth Vader, the Empire captures Princess Leia and threatens to destroy her home planet, Alderaan, unless she gives up the location of the Rebel base. Princess Leia acquiesces to their demands, but they blow up Alderaan anyway, forcing her to watch.

In Star Trek: Romulan baddie Nero holds Future Spock responsible for letting Romulus get destroyed by a supernova … 100 years in the future (don't worry about being confused; it barely makes any sense in the movie). After Nero captures Spock, he banishes our favorite Vulcan to an ice planet (itself a rip-off of the ice planet, Hoth, from Empire Strikes Back) and makes him watch as Vulcan gets sucked into a black hole.

 “Obi-Wan? Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time … a long time …”

In Star Wars: On Tatooine, Luke goes off half-cocked looking for answers to a mysterious distress call from Princess Leia and gets attacked by some Tusken Raiders. All is almost lost until a mysteriously cloaked figure comes to the rescue: It’s Obi-Wan Kenobi.

In Star Trek: Kirk, himself banished to the aforementioned Faux-Hoth, is about to get eaten by a giant monster (that’s straight out of Cloverfield, p.s.), until a cloaked figure comes to the rescue: It’s Future Spock, saving the day, Obi-Wan style!

“Great shot kid, that was one in a million!”

In Star Wars: Just as Luke’s fighter is about to get blown away by Darth Vader, prodigal son Han Solo returns in the Millennium Falcon, fires some photon torpedoes, and saves the day.

In Star Trek: Just as Spock’s fighter is about to get blown away by a bunch of Romulan missiles, the Enterprise comes out of hyperspace, fires some photon torpedoes, and … well, you can probably figure out what happens next.

Star Trek

What’s the story: As the ads proclaim, “This is not your father’s Star Trek!” Though, to be honest, that’s probably just another way of saying, “You don’t need to wear a Klingon costume to see this movie!” J. J. Abrams’ long-awaited reboot of the iconic franchise goes all origin to find out how Captain Kirk (Matt Damon look-alike Chris Pine) became Captain Kirk, but apparently manages to keep things mainstream enough to appeal to Trekkies and non-Trekkies alike. Expect lens flares, space battles and Leonard Nimoy. For The Observer’s take, read Sara Vilkomerson’s rave here.

Who should see it: William Shatner.

Next Day Air

What’s the story: Hello, counterprogramming! Mos Def and Donald Faison star as a pair of deliverymen who mistakenly give a package of cocaine to the wrong guy. Needless to say, differences ensue. Think of this as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels meets Friday, but without either film’s charms

Who should see it: Ice Cube and Chris Tucker.

Rudo y Cursi

What’s the story: Real-life best friends Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna reunite onscreen for the first time since Y Tu Mamá También in Rudo y Cursi, a film about two brothers from a small Mexican farming village who rocket to stardom as soccer icons. (In keeping with the reunion vibe: Y Tu Mamá co-writer Carlos Cuarón directs and his brother, Alfonso, produces.) The trailer makes Rudo y Cursi seem like a Will Ferrell–John C. Reilly vehicle, but considering you’ll probably be lost in the dreamy eyes of Messrs. Bernal and Luna for two hours, quality of narrative won’t really matter.

Who should see it: Pelé.

A few disclaimers at the top. We were never that into the seminal television show or any of the movies that came before this one. We knew enough—Captain Kirk was kind of a horndog, Spock had some emotional issues (but he wanted people to live long and prosper), the U.S.S. Enterprise was some sort of amazing spaceship and etc—but we happily discovered early on it didn't matter and this movie isn't exclusively for the fanboys.  It's an origins story, and as we've said before, who doesn't want to get down with an origins story? We learn at the start of the film about some of the events that sent James T. Kirk hurtling down a path to greatness (hey, nice three-second cameo, House's Jennifer Morrison!).  Kirk (Chris Pine) is a handsome hothead who is mainly concerned about who will next share his bed. But after meeting Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood, who we now have a super-duper crush on) he's convinced to give Starfleet Academy a whirl. We also meet Spock (Heroes' Zachary Quinto), half-Vulcan and half-human (his mother is Winona Ryder! Seriously! It's kind of crazy, and even more so that our poor waif-y heroine from yesteryear doesn't get more screen time) who must make a decision about which culture he needs to embrace. When Spock and Kirk first meet, they don't like each other one bit and both actors do an excellent job in doing pretty good homages to Mr. Nimoy and Mr. Shatner without ever once seeming silly or contrived. There is a lot of space stuff and excitement and high-class weapons and about a thousand references we're sure we didn't get but you know what? We got enough, and Mr. Abrams made sure even those who don't know the tenets of Vulcanism or every facet of Starfleet etiquette could follow along and have a good time. 

We either owe Mr. Abrams a huge debt or should be really mad at him for how much space in our brain has been taken up watching his television shows: Felicity, Alias, Lost. On the other hand, we did not appreciate Cloverfield. But here with Star Trek, he manages to control the action scenes with great pacing while slowing things down at the right time to get some real emotion, and some big laughs in as well (more Simon Pegg next time, please!). For us, the craziest part was realizing after the movie was over that the big bad villain this time around is played by Eric Bana. Is that guy just everywhere these days or what (you'll see, he's still got Funny People and The Time Traveler's Wife as well as his documentary about being in love with his car). Anyway, Mr. Bana takes on evil with relish, and threatens the end of the world as we know it with aplomb. We can't wait for the sequel. 

Granted, both Star Trek and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will be runaway smashes come their releases—it doesn’t take a genius to expect box office results that warrant sequels—but there is still risk involved. Throwing a bunch of money at a third Transformers movie might seem like a smart move right this second, but, by August, Paramount could be singing a different tune. If fans don’t like the second film, they won’t come back as strongly for a third go-around (see the $113 million drop off between the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean films). These movies cost too much money to result in a diminishing return. By trying to stay ahead of the curve on Transformers, Paramount could end up falling behind.

Meanwhile, Star Trek’s vocal fan base is already excited about what they’ve seen—the early geek reviews have been ecstatic. But the decades have not been kind to the franchise in the eyes of the general public, and as the failure of Watchmen taught Hollywood, they can’t just market to the geeks and expect to turn a profit. Star Trek will make money, but whether it makes money remains to be seen.

The go-ahead for The Hangover sequel has us scratching our heads even more. Mr. Phillips’ film should be one of the sleeper hits of the summer—a kind of Wedding Crashers-lite that could make Warner Brothers upwards of $100 million. (That it looks absolutely hilarious certainly doesn’t hurt.) But what happens if The Hangover doesn’t hit? It’s not like Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis and Ed Helms are superstars; there is some inherent risk here that the film won’t attack the zeitgeist like everyone expects. Does Warner Brothers have so much left over in the coffers from The Dark Knight that they could just throw a bunch of cash at Messrs. Phillips and Armstrong on the off chance they might produce a sequel?

Call us old fashioned, but we preferred things the way they used to be: movies became hits and then lazy sequels were announced. Is Hollywood so excited to stamp down originality that they can’t wait an extra few months to do it?

Fringe (Tuesdays at 9 on Fox): One of the most hyped entries from last fall, Fringe has actually acquitted itself fairly well on Tuesday nights. Creatively, J.J. Abrams’ take on The X-Files has found a solid footing, though truth be told, we still get the feeling that Fringe should be a little bit better—why isn’t Joshua Jackson allowed to actually do anything on this show? Minor quibbles aside, however, all signs appear pointed towards another season; last month Fox announced the crew of Fringe would relocate their filming for year two from New York to the less expensive Vancouver. While not an official pickup, that seems to bode well. Being cost conscious is so hot right now. Pick-Up Probability: 98%

Ugly Betty (Thursdays at 8 on ABC): Frankly the idea that Ugly Betty might not be around for another season seems almost unbelievable. It was just three years ago that the show burst onto the scene, winning over fans and critics in the process. Now ABC is pulling it off the schedule in the middle of the season so that it can run episodes of Samantha Who? (a show which has moved around more than the Island on Lost during the past couple of years) and new series In the Motherhood. Despite that bizarre decision, one that usually portends cancellation, ABC executives assure everyone that Ugly Betty will be just fine. We tend to believe them, just because they don’t really have a lot of other options. Then again, these are the same people who told us that the final episodes of Dirty Sexy Money would actually air. Pick-Up Probability: 86%

Heroes (Mondays at 9 on NBC): To borrow from Woody Allen: Television shows are like sharks; they have to keep moving forward or they die. Well, Heroes is looking more and more like a dead shark. As with Ugly Betty, it would have seemed unfathomable to picture Heroes getting canceled just a couple of years ago, but how quickly things change. The ratings stink, critics are out for blood and even the fans don’t seem to care anymore. It also doesn’t help that co-star Greg Grunberg used his Twitter page to say farewell to the cast and crew earlier this week. He has since backtracked, but it all seems a tad fishy. Pick-Up Probability: 52%

Chuck (Mondays at 8 on NBC): This one hurts. Simply, we love Chuck. It’s easily one of the most charming and enjoyable television shows we’ve seen in a long time, and, to NBC’s credit, they’ve stuck with it, leaving Chuck in the same time slot and promoting it heavily. They want the show to work! It’s just too bad it isn’t, really. The ratings are poor, and it seems doubtful that Chuck will all of a sudden gain an additional five million viewers overnight. Last weekend at WonderCon, creator Josh Schwartz said that even if NBC doesn’t pick up Chuck for a third year, the season finale would be satisfying enough to serve as a series ender. We sure hope so. Pick-Up Probability: 37%

Phew! This already sounds like a total mess. The last thing J.J. Abrams has been able to handle properly is the romantic comedy; just look at his derisible former television show October Road (or do yourself a favor and don't). And while Mr. Michell (Notting Hill), Ms. McKenna and Ms. McAdams are clearly comfortable within the genre, they all seem to fit into different subcategories.

Then there's Harrison Ford. At the risk of blaspheme, we never thought Mr. Ford was a great actor. He was a great movie star, mostly because he was able to slide along on his irascible charm, making girls swoon and boys grin. Unfortunately, that charm has long disappeared. It would be easy to point to his grumpy and sullen performance in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as the tipping point--Mr. Ford spent the entirety of that film looking like a child sitting in front of a giant plate of broccoli--but we'd argue that he hasn't been charming in nearly twenty years. Spells of tight and unhappy performances litter his resume, from Sabrina to Hollywood Homicide to Firewall (truly one of the worst movies ever produced). At this point in his career, Mr. Ford is totally wrong for a romantic comedy, a genre that lives and dies on the charm of its actors. Barring Meryl Streep being cast as his co-anchor (which, face it, would be awesome), we think this project is doomed to fail under the weight of his frowning visage before it even gets off the ground.