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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977)
...and a generation of teenagers said "No, take me! My family hates me too!" It's funny how people have been conditioned to so singularly expect how The Man would react to visits from aliens - and it's all thanks to nothing more than a few movies and those damned X-Files. Close Encounters predates the whole UFO-conspiracy-paranoia thing, and the people who want to keep the visiting aliens a secret here seem almost quaintly benign. All they do to discourage people from witnessing the aliens is lie about a toxic spill, fly out the holdouts in helicopters, and if all else fails, drop a little sleeping gas. It's really quite nice to see, after we've seen all these movies where witnesses are killed or mentally raped left and right, even entire towns are destroyed just to prolong the secrecy of the arrival of something which will probably be back in greater, and much louder, numbers. The first movie to get a "director's cut" post-release tinkering, CE3K has gotten more than one such treatment; Spielberg kept dicking around with this movie up until 1998. I couldn't say how one cut stacks up to another; I've only seen two, and one was in the 80's. This is the one we've got now though; I believe it's the only version available on video. The first ten minutes are a chore to get through - it's either people shouting over sandstorms, or people shouting over each other and hyperactive toys. And even after that, we get one kid whining about fractions while another kid smashes shit, Teri Garr complains about tetanus and Richard Dreyfuss plays with his trains. It's a cacophonous start, for a movie that would ultimately suggest that the universal language is music. Dreyfuss plays an electrical lineman who, late one night, has a "close encounter" with an alien spaceship (just what the different, numbered "kinds" are is something you'd have to have seen the ads to understand). He's understandably fascinated by what's happened (and continues to happen) to him, but doesn't seem to realize that he's also losing his fucking mind, which pretty much destroys his marriage and profoundly disturbs his eldest son. With nothing left to lose after his family falls apart, it's little wonder that he makes the decision he makes at the conclusion of the film; Spielberg said that it was an ending he couldn't make today, and that's probably obvious for anyone who takes their family responsibilities seriously. But if you're invited to fly away with and live among space aliens, how do you turn that down? Talk about a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A single mom in town (Melinda Dillon) also witnesses some UFO phenomenon along with her young boy and as you might imagine, her and the Dreyfuss character soon become the only people on earth who even remotely understand each other. In a parallel plot, François Truffaut (!) plays a scientist who chases these phenomena around the globe and finally settles on a meeting place at the superbly iconic Devil's Tower. Wonder and discovery are what this movie's all about - the Spielberg Special really, and he pulls it off more consistently here than he ever would again. It's like the best non-thriller moments of Jurassic Park, but there's a whole movie of them. An extended climax of breathless majesty builds and builds and builds like nothing I've ever seen. Excepting maybe 2001: A Space Odyssey, the sheer awesomeness of first contact with an alien intelligence or civilization has never been so...awesome. CE3K does risk a little pandering by showing as much of its aliens as it does, but it still leaves the viewer with the kind of questions that encourage a little speculation. Despite all we see of the aliens and their ships, we're still left at the end knowing very little about them. The aliens look like your standard big-eyed "greys", and their motives seem clear: contact and communication. Where they're mysterious is in their methods. Why do they lead the police on a chase by sticking to the roads (since they don't have to, what with the flying)? They seem to be making a deliberate effort to make their arrival known, but not WELL-known, charitably assisting the scientists and military which would just as soon keep it as quiet as possible. For that matter, the question of why they take an interest in any specific person - Dreyfuss, single mom, anyone - is unanswerable. As the plot reveals, they are definitely interested in very specific people over others, but just why is anyone's guess, unless it's a simple case of right place, right time. That they would effectively "invite" these people to their big party seems like a self-defeating effort if they're simultaneously helping the scientists and military keep the hush-hush on their arrival. Since they're obviously peaceful, why did they abduct a two-year-old kid? Again, I think that probably comes back to the question of how you turn down a chance like that. Regardless of what his mom thought, the kid wanted to come along...maybe the aliens don't have the same regard for parental authority we do. We have no reason, at the end of the movie, to believe anybody ever got taken against their will, even the vanished "Flight 19". And what's with the religious cult that's preparing to go away on the ship? Surely they don't think any more advanced species wants anything at all to do with a cult who dresses in creepy red uniforms, and indeed they don't; a nice breath of rationality in a movie that otherwise flirts a lot with the idea of alien visitation as a religious experience. This isn't what gets called "hard SF" - a fair bit of the movie is more on the touchy-feely side than I'd like (that is, before Contact wrote the book on touchy-feely alien-contact movies). But it's so nice to see such a movie where the scientists mostly have their shit together and are making sincere and well-considered efforts to do their part of the contacting. Not really a lot to say on this one that hasn't been said a million times...Close Encounters is one of those "make you feel like a kid again" movies, both in the timing of its release (helps that it came out when I was a kid), and in that its benign aliens are greeted with an absence of the paranoid hostility that got attached to almost every first-contact story since. While some conflict is eventually inevitable in such a meeting, I hope and believe that should that day ever come, we'll be smart enough to be friendly. (c) Brian J. Wright 2006 BACK TO THE C's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |