author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

The movie Super 8 opens with a long interior shot of a steel mill, and the camera swings in to focus on the big green sign hanging above the workers and the machines. Every assembly line and production factory has one. There's the name and logo of the company in the upper left, and in the upper right a slogan conveying the company's ostensible concern for workplace safety. In the lower right, there are five big spaces with hooks at the top. The three right-most hooks are occupied with digits denoting how many days it's been since the last employee accident: 784.

The camera's slow movement comes to a stop with the sign filling the entire screen just as a man finishes ascending a ladder. Without any expression, he takes the cards reading 7 and 8 and 4 off of their hooks.

He hangs up a card that says 1.

Then he descends the ladder.

Just one scene. Not a word spoken. Just a single, simple action that goes straight to the audience's heart, because with it we know, without any fuss or emotive acting, that someone died yesterday. We also know that we're going to be in very good hands for the next two hours.