Paramount showed a preview of upcoming films leading up to a special twenty-minute presentation of Super 8. Wish I could have seen it, but I did not, one of the lucky guests reports on the footage, and a little background info on the project from a special guest. Spoilers ahead. As well as a long description of the twenty minutes.
Matt Patches of Collider.com reports,
“Then we got to the part we’d been waiting for: 20 minutes of Super 8. J.J. Abrams explained the origins of the movie, how he was a fan of Super 8 films when he was a kid and was able to integrate that concept into another Area 51-style story he was developing. The result is Super 8, which is part biographical part fantastical. Abrams also told a hilarious story about how, at the age of 16, he entered a Super 8 film contest with director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) and won. The young duo caught notice of then Spielberg assistant Kathleen Kennedy, who personally asked if the boys would be interested in cleaning up and preserving Spielberg’s childhood Super 8 films. Even while retelling the story, Abrams was in disbelief — who would let two 16-year-olds handle Spielberg’s films?! — but they did and he’d never forget it.
Before the lights dimmed and the footage played, Abrams warned us that these were completely unfinished scenes. Incomplete SFX, incomplete sound, incomplete color. This was rough, and frankly, he didn’t want to show us. He also didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag on any spoilers, so for the sake of the mystery (because it’s more fun that way), you won’t find anything too shocking here.
Abrams played two scenes for us: a lengthier version of the train wreck scene featured in the trailer and a brief scene at a gas station post-train wreck. In the trailer we see the boys setting up camera before everything derails and that’s what plays out at length in the opening. The vibe is very Goonies in all the right ways — these kids Abrams have found are pitch perfect. They talk like 14-year-olds, they act like 14-year-olds. They’re dynamic is fun loving and they’re having a ball making this zombie movie.
That is, until a truck zips past them, pulls on to the train tracks and takes the locomotive off the tracks. The kids run for cover (as seen in the trailer) and the scene in full is miraculous. You don’t get a sense from the trailer, but the wreck scene is almost entirely practical. At one point a train car barrels through the station and the entire building explodes, wooden panels, metal beams, debris and all. Burning train parts fly through the air as the kids run through the warzone. The main character Joe, a loner kid who recently lost his Mom in a mill accident, witnesses something banging around in one of the cars, but loses focus when his friends call for him. Saying too much would spoil, but Joe and his friends do encounter the man who deliberately drove head on into the train — a man that they know, but we don’t. Creepy!
The shorter scene was a glimpse at an attack on the gas station by the “thing.” A cop and a station attendee mill about in the middle of the night only to cross paths with “it,” which we know from the trailers has some serious powers. In the trailer, we see the attendant being pulled across the floor of the convenience store. From the footage, we just know that he takes quite a walloping before then. Even in this scene, Abrams isn’t giving anything up — who or what was trapped in that train is very much a mystery. To the viral campaign!"
(Source:Matt Patches, Collider, http://collider.com/super-8-preview-mission-impossible-4-footloose/82162/)