ET is schlocky by today’s standards, and i never liked it even as a kid, but Close Encounters still is one of the better movies ever made. Close and Jaws shouldn’t feel embarrassed to be side by side (Jaws can be fairly dated and imperfect before they go fishing, imo).
If there is about those early 80s movies that still resonate is the sense of verisimilitude lost in modern over-the-top cinema; the aliens are believable, the characters are believable, even the abduction scene which to an extent channels a thunderstorm on the great plains ala Wizard of Oz, feels somehow recognizably horribly real in a natural phenomenon that we can’t quite understand way (like listening to a tornado hiding in a cellar). But most of all is the lack of cynicism. The government might be a bit paranoid, but they fundamentally aren’t “bad”, they just want control. The scientists are rational and make breakthroughs that “feel” sensible and realistic, and the aliens are aspirational figures and not melodramatic villains that travel 4 billion miles but can’t figure out how to open a door.
Back in the day this was the true brilliance of Steven. This, Jaws and ET did a great job of capturing ‘real life’ families. Thus, when the weird shit happened you believed it even more.
I love the scene where he wakes up and the kids have navigated around his mess to the TV to watch looney tunes. Anyone with kids knows they would do exactly this…no mess or obstacle stands in the way of sat morning TV.
I feel the same way about ET, Elliot’s family were just that a family. Scenes like them playing DnD and the Yoda voice, just come across real.
Close Encounters is really a great movie… It’s easy to think of Spielberg as a schlockmeister, but in the mid 70’s when he was at his finest he was making movies that drew fairly gritty, funny, realistic portraits of middle-class characters, then thrust them into these magnificent B-movie plots (attack of the giant shark! aliens have landed!) in a way that few others have ever pulled off.
The first draft of Close Encounters was written by Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull), based on a story Spielberg wrote around 1970. According to Frank Sanello’s book on the director, Spielberg’s original story was a conspiracy thriller about a government cover-up of an alien landing, sort of All The President’s Little Green Men, or something like that. The story goes, Schrader turned his draft into a heavy-handed Calvinist allegory, whereby Richard Dreyfuss’ character is Paul of Tarsus and the visiting aliens represent God. (One article describes Schrader’s protagonist as “a crusading religious fruitcake a la Travis Bickle”).
Needless to say, Spielberg found Schrader’s version laughable and either re-wrote it or wrote an entirely new version to suite his own tastes. It is interesting, though, that there remains at the core of the film some of the “Paul visited by the angels” thematic material, as Dreyfuss’ character is like Paul a man who ends up trading in his “normal” material existence to undertake a spiritual journey.
I’m a fan of Jaws, particularly the parts not written by Spielberg, like Robert Shaw’s Indianapolis speech. That was before he became obsessed with manipulative, heavy-handed schmaltz.
I do give Spielberg kudos for probably being the best action scene director in the business - coherent even when chaotic, creative and exciting as hell – the battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan, the T-Rex attack and Raptor Kitchen scene in JP, the Tripods attacking the ferry in War of the Worlds, most of the action scenes in Raiders, etc. I just would rather watch most of his movies in German.
Jaws is pretty much a perfect movie. I think that and Raiders are Spielberg’s personal best, but as Desslock noted he’s still always good for some incredible action/suspense sequences. The Tripod attack sequence in War of the Worlds showed the Bays and McG’s up for the amateurs they are.
Re: Close Encounters, I’m not sure if I’ve ever watched the whole thing start to finish. I like the depiction of suburban chaos in the early scenes, and the climax is iconic. Still, it’s a bit long and slow in the middle stretches. I’ll have to give this one a proper sitdown again one of these days.
See also: Poltergeist. Way, way freakier than I remember. My wife and I rented it for our kids (13, 10) and their friends for Halloween last year; something to do after we finished trick-or-treating. PG rating; how bad could it be? Oops.
I saw Close encounters at the perfect age of 15, and it was one of the first big films I ever saw in a cinema, after ‘Jaws’. I was so impressed, and equally with the music, that I ran out and bought my first record, the soundtrack. I also saw ‘Star Wars’ that same year, and oddly, that did nothing for me in comparison. I preferred the ‘horror’.
What really cemented my appreciation of the movie was showing the album to my grandmother, who was visiting from Germany. She was a Jehovah witness. I was all excited, just having seen the movie, and proudly showed her my very first record album! She looks the soundtrack album over, then says, “Quatsche!” (Bullshit). “There is only man.” She then handed me a little red book called 'Your youth - making the best of it." one of the greatest collections of humor I had ever read, next to Woody Allen’s books. One of my favorite chapters was about how boys should not wear tight pants that caused friction, causing them to spill valuable seed. I’m not making this up.
That ‘close encounter’ with Jehovah Oma turned me into a fervent atheist. Too bad I couldn’t take her to see ‘The Thing’ a few years later.
I rewatched the movie last year. What I love about it now is how the film is structured, almost like a piece of music. It is basically one big crescendo… Starting from small pieces of information, and adding more and more details constantly… getting bigger and bigger (sorry, can’t explain it better).
Oh I love this film. IMO one of the greatest American films of all time. Richard Dreyfus at his finest. I watched it most recently about four months ago and it rings true to me in ways that Jaws doesn’t. A big rubber shark kinda takes away from the scariness for me. Not that I don’t think Jaws is excellent but Close Encounters is an almost perfect film. I totally agree with the sentiment that Spielberg is a master of filming families that seem real, at least in that era. He somehow got the kids to “be” rather than “act” and you don’t see that level of skill too often.
Couldn’t agree more. That scene, the scene where the kids sneak up and smack Dreyfuss’ ass with a ping-pong paddle while he’s brushing his teeth, the way the kids sleep in ridiculous positions, it was all great stuff.
I had read somewhere that once Spielberg adopted those kids he began to regard them as the wondrous beings of precocious wisdom or whatever that you saw in his films from the mid-80s onward.
Then, I guess, they all became teenagers and young adults in time, which pissed him off, so he filmed Schindler’s List and he killed more kids in that film than tuberculosis. I like where he’s at these days, very grim and either the kids start out dead (Minority Report) or are at worst somewhat precocious but at least more believable than child characters from his earlier films (War of the Worlds). Anyway his new fetish is Tom Cruise, for better or worse.
I didn’t care much for Dreyfuss and the family. They just annoyed me, really. Typical Spielberg grounding of a big concept in a small-scale human story, which in principle works well, but which didn’t work for me here.
I liked the musical tones, the scenes in other countries, the sci-fi stuff, the mothership f/x, and all that, the stuff that would ordinarily be considered just tinsel wrapping on a movie. For me, that stuff was the movie, though. I haven’t seen it since it came out, would like to see it again, though.
Did you see what your favourite reviewer just wrote about it?
can never watch this film again, ever. Because it drives me crazy. Because the human activity/behavior in the film is relentlessly idiotic or dumbfounding or manic or cloying…movies that project such a forbidding after-vibe that you actually feel a bit nauseous when you see them on a shelf or online somewhere? Movies so bad that you would refuse to see them even if a guy promised to add 1000 American Air Lines air-miles to your tally.
Yeah, I don’t really feel like I’m missing out. At least not until I finally see the hundreds of movies from directors I respect that I still haven’t seen.
I saw this in the theaters when I was 4 years old, and according to my mom I drove her and dad crazy because in my 4 year old mind, it was clear that there were Close Encounters of the First and Close Encounters of the Second kind movies out there somewhere I had missed and I wanted to see them (I didn’t have a sense of sequels or prequels or franchises or anything like that, but I knew how to count! A little bit!)
