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One of the most optimistic and joyous films ever made, Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the magical and uplifting antidote to all of those cynical, close-minded movies about dangerous beings from outer space (films like Independence Day, for example). In Spielberg's world, these beings are not hostile but benevolent, and the eventual meeting between humans and aliens is a moving vision of different cultures embracing one another. Despite the film's memorable ending, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is not really about aliens at all, but about heedless human passion that can not be restrained. Richard Dreyfuss, a Spielberg favourite, plays Roy Neary...an everyday electrician whose comfortable domestic routine is shattered by his encounter with an alien ship. He begins to alienate (no pun intended) his wife and family with his obsessive and irrational behaviour. Spielberg intercuts Roy's growing madness with a similar character named Jillian who also has a "close encounter" when her boy is abducted. Roy and Jillian eventually join forces in their quest to explain a mysterious vision that they both share...though tellingly, their relationship does not develop romantically but rather as a shared bond of inexplicable passion. The third obsessed character is Lacombe, a French scientist played by the paternal and gentle director Francois Truffaut. Spielberg unfolds Close Encounters in a mysterious fashion, with each scene being completely realistic and believable by itself while creating a tone that is unique and bizarre. When I first saw Close Encounters, I felt that Roy's abandonment of his family was too cold and nonsensical. But Spielberg doesn't belittle Roy's decision...and perhaps the young director felt that his protagonist was justified in pursuing a passion rather than being confined to his domestic duties. Close Encounters is a true oddity: a commercial, mainstream movie that dares to achieve transcendence in an unconventional manner. It is not one of Spielberg's absolute best films, but it is a measure of the director's talent that for most other filmmakers, it would be their crowning achievement.

(BASIC)

This "thing" was a cliche ridden stinker when it was first released and, Guess what? It still (June 2004) stinks!!! From the hokey sound stage shots and second-rate models - railroad crossing, mailboxes,.....etc, etc - to the cardboard characters.

Who could ever forget the classic scene where we see a group of "believers" - UFO groupies, I guess - waiting by the side of a road for an appearance by the aliens. Never mind that a little kid is just about creamed by a truck as he stands in the middle of a highway. Do any of the "enlightened" new-agers do ANYTHING to get the tyke out of harm's way? Nope!

And then, of course, there's the wonderful scene that goes on and on and on....as our hero builds a mountain out of mashed potatoes! Another masterful scene? Hardly. Oh well, you get the idea. At least least Spielberg didn't throw in a crop circle or two!!! What a piece of junk!! Ugh!!

WOW, AWESOME, GREAT CAST, SUSPENSEFUL, IMAGINATIVE, WELL ACTED. THE SPIELBERG TOUCH

What if there was life outside our planet? And what if the aliens came to visit us? What would happen?
These are questions that fascinate the majority of us and that have been brought up in countless movies such as Signs, MIB and Fire in The Sky, or series such as The X-files, Taken and quite recently The 4400.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind provides the most plausible scenario.

Fresh of the success off Jaws, this was the movie Spielberg decided to make next.
The whole thing starts of mysterious: airplanes from the 40's have been found back in brand new shape while pilots have seen strange aircrafts in the air.
We are soon introduced to Roy Neary, who goes to fix a power failure in the middle of nowhere.
While he's riding on the road he sees some strange lights and a bit further he, along with others, sees the UFO's in all of their glory.

What happens then is what would happen if this had really happened. Everyone deems Roy to be a crazy man, even his wife. While the relationship with his wife changes for the worse, the government decides to cover things up.
The only person who can relate to Roy is Jillian, who saw the same thing.
It's in these scenes we can feel the frustration of Roy, in one scene he even shouts: "I did not ask to see these things."
Roy in fact becomes more and more obsessed with a shape he can't identify.
Things take a turn when he finds out what it is.

As is to be expected from a Spielberg movie, the characters are placed above the story and it's what makes the movie works.
Spielberg has dealt with the frustrations of those who saw the UFO's and how it's starting to take over their life.
It's nice to see the differences between Roy and Claude. While Claude has wanted to see proof of alien life for quite some time, it ends up being Roy, an average Joe, who sees them. The differences and similarities between these characters are pretty interesting.

The actions the government takes were also rather realistic and something I could see happening if a situation like this would happen.

The supporting cast does fine, but it's all about Dreyfuss who gives another tremendous performance as the guy who's dealing with what he saw.

Spielberg also proves how gifted a filmmaker is. If you don't believe me, just check out the scene where the aliens "visit" Jilian's house. It feels very ominous and is very intense. It's very likely that these are the scenes that influenced Shyamalan to do Signs.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of Spielberg's finest, because he understood it's about Roy's journey and not about the special effects. The movie's exciting, intelligent, plausible and entertaining. The emotions all feel real instead of being there just to elicit tears.
I love the ending as well:
No Roy returning to his family, but him accepting his gift.
A shame Spielberg followed this one up with the abysmal 1941. 9.9/10

The movie just feels dated, goofy, and not to memorable.

***/****

Some say that this flick hasn't held up, the aliens look fake, blah blah blah. You can tell what's wrong with a lot of new Sci fi movies after you watch this one. There's a story, with characters that you care about. Maybe the moviemakers think that everyone has ADD now and can't/won't follow a story for 2 or 3 hours. I think some of the moviemakers have ADD and don't know how to carry a story through.

Close Encounters still works for me. It isn't important that they could do the SFX better now; its good enough. Much of the effect is mental anyway, and its done so well that a bunch of effects aren't needed. I was drawn in by the fixation they had with the image they felt compelled to sculpt/draw/scribble, not knowing what it was that got burned into their brains.

This movie is close to a 10 but gets a few nitpiks for a somewhat vague ending. I think the 3 should've all gotten in the ship. The whole poison gas diversion would've met with a lot more skepticism by the locals. At least they didn't have the military try to blow everything up it sees as they probably would now if they did a remake.

The DVD version of the movie is well worth the purchase price. I was very surprised about the scenes that were deleted. Usually deleted scenes are fairly unimportant, but most of these made the whole subplot about the Dreyfuss character make a lot more sense. They filled big chunks of what his situation was at work, what about the other people that saw the UFOs, etc... It really sets him up as being on his own with no one to back him up. The DVD is also a 9.3/10

Garden State (Braff, 2004)
Personal Rating: 7/10 :fresh:
A hilarious movie with excellent dialogue. Goes off the deep end in the later part with one uninspired epiphany after another to conclude everything, but it's characters, relationships, and dialogue are so entertaining and memorable that it's easy to overlook its flaws.
Objective Rating: 8/10

Hero (Yimou, 2003)
Personal Rating: 7/10 :fresh:
A martial arts film disguised as an art film or an art film disguised as a martial arts film? Either way, the driving force is the film's narrative, which is unique for (what I've seen in) its genre. It's more then just a series of flashbacks, it slowly reveals the characters' lies, motives, and actions but perhaps lacks the truth. Due to scenes done in flashback that could not be seen in that way we are keep in the dark about whether it's what really happened, what a character believes happened, or what a character wishes had happened. The steady supply of lies throughout the film keeps us prepared to interpret what we see rather then accept it. Outside of that the film has some great visuals but looses my interest at times (I'm just not an art film kind of guy).

EDIT: I watched the imported DVD. Is there anything different in the american release?
Objective Rating: 8/10

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977)
Personal Rating: 3/10 :rotten:
It's one of those films I just don't understand the praise for. Spielberg's direction is great (as usual) but his script is just bad. His characters just lack any rationality to the point where they cross into stupidity. I know their irrational behavior is what the film is about but by completely ignoring an extremely common human characteristic the film dehumanizes its characters, leaving them as un-relatable plot devices in the story. The thrills quickly fade when we don't care about the characters.

As if that's not enough, I was also bothered by the random kinetics of the aliens. Random shit just happens to make the scene cool. It does make the scene very, very cool, but it's so random that it becomes uninspired. I won't even go into the incredibly bad "these are longitude and latitude coordinates" scene but the film is littered with bad dialogue and ridiculous happenings that not even Spielberg's excellent direction (which is very apparent in all the close encounter scenes) can completely save. Thank goodness he rarely directs his own scripts.
Objective Rating: 5/10

Miller's Crossing (Coen, 1990)
Personal Rating: 9/10 :fresh:
A slue of homages, stereotypes, and Coen style with a complex (but not overdone or over-dramatized) story. This is some of the Coens' best work. In addition to all these great things the film also creates enough tension to have me gripping my seat or holding my breath on a few occasions. It deserves a place among the great gangster movies while paying its respects to them.
Objective Rating: 8/10

The Man Who Wasn't There (Coen, 2001)
Personal Rating: 5/10 :rotten:
Film noir just ain't my thing. Perhaps I'm just not familiar enough with the genre to appreciate everything the Coens are doing here. The scenes seem well crafted but the story and characters aren't presented in any impressive stylized way... and they aren't strong enough to speak for themselves. So it becomes powerful at some moments but a lot of it feels as mundane to me as its main character.
Objective Rating: 7/10

If mainstream films, especially critically and commercially successful mainstream films, reflect contemporary socio-cultural norms and aspirations, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, written and directed by Steven Spielberg, mirrored the late 1970s zeitgeist and the twin obsessions with unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and the mysterious disappearances of airplanes and ships inside the Bermuda Triangle. Almost as importantly, Close Encounters of the Third Kind offered a positive, affirmative alternative to the paranoid conceptualization of aliens as destructive, horde-like conquerors, irredeemably other. As a corollary, human beings react not with disgust, revulsion, or fear of the aliens (and their ships), but with curiosity, wonderment, and awe.

With rare exceptions (e.g., The Day The Earth Stood Still, It Came From Outer Space), aliens in 1950s science-fiction films were defined by their desire for world domination, with little or no concern for human life. Beneath the genre conventions, aliens metaphorically represented American fears of the anti-individualistic, communist menace. Instead, Spielberg envisions aliens as benevolent visitors interested in interspecies communication. The aliens in Close Encounters are, in essence, the secularized versions of the angels found in Christian mythology. Aliens, in 70s pop mythology, represented multiple, ambiguous possibilities (their intentions always in dispute), but with their desexualized appearance (closely followed by Spielberg), they also represented a purer, pre-sexual state of being. Aliens were also considered intermediaries to a higher form of (harmonious) existence, one entirely unlike our own. For Spielberg's central character, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), his personal journey resonates on a mythic level, marked by an exteriorized spiritual quest that involves physical obstacles and challenges (i.e., climbing a mountain). Spielberg was certainly aware of the religious symbols underlying Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He tips his hand by having the central character and his family watch The Ten Commandments, another religious/mythological story involving a mountain, communication with a deity, and enlightenment. In 1980, Spielberg re-released Close Encounters, adding an extended, but superfluous, scene inside the mothership. Spielberg later realized the intractable problem of attempting to represent a secular version of the afterlife, and deleted the scene from the version found on the "Collector's Edition" DVD (it can be, however, found on the DVD's extras).

Spielberg's narrative strategy is evident from the opening scenes, which feature the discovery of WWII fighter planes in the Sonora Desert (Mexico) by government operatives and scientists, and a near collision of commercial aircraft over the Indianapolis skies followed by an air traffic controller. After these opening scenes, the audience is introduced to the protagonist, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), a power company technician. Neary is a harried husband to Ronnie (Teri Garr) and distracted father to his children; in short, Neary is the suburban male archetype. Despite the trappings of suburban conformity, Roy is less defined by his roles as father and husband than by his childlike sense of wonder, his openness to unseen possibilities. His nostalgic, romanticized attachment to his own childhood is evident in the opening scene: the living room has been overstuffed with the objects of his obsession, including an elaborate train set. As his wife draws him out of his distractions, a family get together is offered. Neary prefers Pinocchio to Goofy Golf, primarily because it reminds him of his own responsibility-free childhood. A local power outage leads to a midnight call from his supervisor at the power company. Neary, alone in his pickup truck, encounters a UFO at a railroad crossing. Spielberg films this scene with an emphasis on suspense, with the audience sharing Neary's sense of increasing dislocation and disorientation. This first, direct encounter with the aliens gives little hint as to the aliens' motives. Neary, we soon learn, has been implanted with a vision, an incomplete image that drives him into an obsessive quest for the meaning behind the image.

It's here, where Close Encounters segues into family drama territory, and where Spielberg risks losing his audience. Neary's obsessive behavior clearly marks him, if only temporarily, as an unlikeable, self-centered character. Nearly loses his job with the power company, and consequently his social status within the neighborhood. Spielberg clearly signals Ronnie as being preoccupied with social status and a desire for (suburban) normality, making her a less than sympathetic character. Spielberg, however, makes the personal and social costs of Neary's obsession clear: his children quickly move from anxious incomprension to anger and despair. But Spielberg clearly drives audience sympathy toward Neary, and the artistic expression of his obsession. As Neary completes a massive sculpture in his living room, the displacement of his family from the center of his life is complete, both literally and figuratively.

Neary, however, isn't alone in his vision quest. Others have been called by the aliens (to what purpose, however, remains unclear). Enter Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) a single mother who lives with her son Barry (Cary Guffy) in a semi-rural area. They too encounter the unseen aliens, but here Spielberg emphasizes the ambiguity in the aliens' actions: their arrival is heralded by the activation of Barry's toys, which in turn adds a layer of discomfort and anxiety to the scene. The aliens, it seems, are interested in luring Barry outside to play with them. As he disappears into the nearby woods, Jillian gives chase, only to cross paths with Neary, as he pursues the UFOs around a bend in the road. Barry's safety, however, has been compromised, and a second visitation by the aliens, this time played for horror (with glowing red lights burning through the windows and keyholes), leads to his abduction. Again, the reasons for the aliens' actions remain ambiguous, unanswered, unsettling.

But the audience has been given an advantage over the two leads: the opening scene introduced the audience to Lacombe (Francois Truffaut), a French scientist who leads a secret, intergovernmental agency seeking direct contact with the aliens. The organization, with an assist from the U.S. military (apparently under the aegis of the United Nations) has decided to withhold information from the American public about the alien visitations (or their ambiguous intentions), as well as coded message from the aliens that has alerted the scientists to a potential rendezvous. To that end, a secret airstrip has been built at the coordinates specified in the message, at the base of Devil's Tower, the same site found in Neary and Jillian's visions. The secret organization, reflecting Spielberg's own predilections, has already decided to err on the side of cautious optimism. Spielberg has little room for the Cold War pessimism reflected in other science-fiction films of the era. Even the secret organization's decision to withhold information is seen, at worst, agnostically (their good intentions allow for only the mildest of criticisms, from Neary and later Lacombe, who recognizes that Neary and the others have been "called" to Devil's Tower by their visions and should, therefore, be given the opportunity to make contact with the aliens).

Neary and Jillian, reunited after the loss of his family (and almost his sanity) to his obsession and the loss of her son to alien abduction, must find their way through a series of literal roadblocks: in order to clear the population near Devil's Tower, the U.S. military has created a suitable rationale, the accidental release of a nerve gas. Neary and Jillian also have to overcome their own doubts, but it's no surprise that their encounter with the military (complete in hazmat suits) leads to a temporary separation, followed by a flight up the mountain on foot as darkness falls. From there, Close Encounters of the Third Kind enters the realm of the metaphysical, with Neary joining the scientists, the technicians, and government agents, in witnessing, and then participating in, the first "official" interspecies contact. This sequence, the longest of the film at nearly 35 minutes and filmed inside a renovated airplane hangar in Alabama, culminates with the arrival of the alien mothership. It unfolds with minimal dialogue, as humans attempt to communicate with the aliens through music. This sequence was more than likely inspired by Stanley Kubrick's 2001 (Douglas Trumball, Spielberg's special effects supervisor, held similar duties on Kubrick's 1968 film). As one character puts it, "They're teaching us a basic tonal vocabulary and today's the first day of school." Here, light, color, sound, music, and movement combine to create what some critics have called "pure cinema," a cinema that bypasses logic and reason to engage the audience on an emotional, and therefore, nonrational/spiritual, level. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, however, pure cinema is first and foremost used to complement Neary's personal journey for the meaning behind his vision, a journey that culminates with the physical and metaphorical flight inside the alien mothership into the night sky and an unknown (perhaps unknowable) destination.

While I personally don't think this is Spielberg's best, I still think it's a good film.

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