Surely the most eagerly awaited film of the summer, J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 whisks the viewer back to a night in 1979, when some Ohio kids shooting a zombie movie witness a terrible train crash. What escaped from the train, and what the kids do to find it, are just two of the secrets that fans of Abrams’s Lost, Alias, Cloverfield and the Star Trek reboot have tried valiantly to unearth. All will be revealed Friday, June 10; but as we’ve told you in the magazine, one secret that needn’t be kept is that Super 8 is a terrific movie, bending and transcending the science-fiction genre into a fable about the power of innocence.
In an extensive interview with TIME last week, the writer-director discussed his teen days making his own super-8 movies, his early brush with Steven Spielberg and his then-assistant Kathleen Kennedy, and the influence of Spielberg’s early Amblin films on Super 8. If you’re wondering what Abrams has cooking over at Bad Robot, his own production, that’s here too.
