`Super 8’ message: Technology not our friend

The march of the machines, it tells us, is not the friend we often think it to be.

There’s no more perfect moment in recent history to use as a canvas for this message than the one Abrams chooses — 1979, the year we really started to realize that technology was biting back.

It was the year of the Three Mile Island meltdown in Pennsylvania — a near-cataclysm referenced in the early moments of “Super 8’’ — and, not incidentally, the year of “The China Syndrome,’’ TMI’s fictional equivalent. It was the year that, in the summer, schoolchildren looked to the heavens and wondered if the hobbled space station called Skylab would land on top of them during its operatic fall to Earth, and Voyager I photos showed Jupiter’s rings.

And, from John Frankenheimer’s environmental horror flick “Prophecy’’ to David Cronenberg’s “The Brood’’ to Don Coscarelli’s “Phantasm’’ and Ridley Scott’s “Alien,’’ it was the year that we returned to 1950s-style movie-house fears — the notion that the weird, metallic, laboratorial works of man might be delivering us to evil, not from it. Even the year’s optimistic space movie, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,’’ featured a plot that showed us the cosmic destruction wrought when machinery goes too far.

Enter “Super 8,’’ which takes place in a quiet Ohio industrial town in the first half of 1979. Its narrative premise, from the first teaser trailers, has been that the camera captures horrors we might not otherwise see. The sound of a movie projector unspooling its tale is used to great dramatic effect.

No “Wonder Years’’-style home movies here, though. The very first scene depicts, in sad silence, the aftermath of an industrial accident at the town’s manufacturing plant — a key character’s loved one torn apart by a malfunctioning machine. A harbinger of the themes to come.

As “Super 8’’ unfurls (minor spoilers ahead), we see: