Close Encounters of the Third Kind

I’ve been putting this one off for a long time because the plot didn’t sound all that appealing to me.  I was also afraid it might be boring.  Well after watching it the idea doesn’t appeal that much to me and it was a little boring.  But it’s not a bad movie at all.  I’m actually glad I waited so long to see it because I think I can appreciate it more now than I would have years ago.

So these spaceships appear in the sky and Roy (Richard Dreyfuss (Jaws, Tin Men)) has an encounter with one of them and gets put under their spell so he has to know more about them and blah blah blah.  Dreyfuss is great in this and fluctuates between the dramatic and comedic aspects of the role easily.  Roy is definitely not as interesting or as colorful of a character as Hooper from Jaws but he’s supposed to be a somewhat boring everyday Midwesterner whose life gets turned upside down.  Melinda Dillon plays the female lead, Jillian, and does fine here too.  She’s best known as the mom from A Christmas Story but she’s a lot more interesting in this film.  Here she has to deal with her son being kidnapped by aliens and also the same uncontrollable obsession with having to know more about the UFOs like Roy.

I tried to approach this movie by keeping in mind that this is Spielberg’s baby.  He did Jaws and broke box office records so now he can do whatever the hell he wants.  So he pens Close Encounters, a dream project for him.  He does a movie about his favorite topic: aliens.  He also throws in a little of his second favorite topic: World War II.  And you can really feel the energy and love that this filmmaker put into the picture.  You can tell that the person that made this movie is really into the subject matter.

And it all comes down to the way this film was shot because Spielberg is about visuals.  The dialogue in the film is pretty flat and uninteresting which appears to be a Spielberg trademark when it comes to his writing.  But he managed to make it work in his favor because there isn’t a whole lot of talking in this picture.  The last half hour has practically no dialogue at all.  But like I said, it’s fine because Dreyfuss’ and Dillon’s facial expressions tell you everything and Spielberg used their body language very effectively. 

Now I’m gonna go out on a limb here, ‘cause we’re talkin’ 1977, but this movie might be Spielberg’s best looking picture.  The cinematography is breathtaking.  Just about every shot is beautifully photographed with wonderful lighting and coloring.  The only time things look a little dull is when it’s daytime out but that’s only a small portion of the film.  I’m struggling to think of the last time the nighttime sky and landscape looked so pretty in a movie.

The whole thing builds to the very last scene where an entire team of scientists (and Roy and Jillian) encounter the mother ship.  As I mentioned in the intro, I’m not really interested in these alien contact movies (and I’m getting really sick of all these aliens-blowing-up-earth movies that have come out recently too) but I have to admit that the last half hour was very touching.  You can tell that Spielberg crafted that whole sequence very meticulously and had been itching to see that vision on film all his life. 

The ship looks great too.  The special effects in this film still look good.  Models are much nicer to look at than CGI.  They have so much charm to them and I think that’s a good word to sum up this movie.  Even if you’re not into space aliens ‘n shit Spielberg wins you over with his enthusiasm for the subject.  He even goes with the typical alien look too with a big egg shaped head, large oval eyes, small mouth and nose, lanky arms and legs and having the thing be butt fucking naked.  How come these classic style aliens in movies never wear clothes?  They don’t have any hair or fur to keep them warm so what if they get cold, do they have a jacket that they can throw on?

So there’s a bunch of good stuff (and goofy alien stuff) here but not everything worked or was necessary though like having a French guy in charge of this alien contact operation because for the whole movie he needs an interpreter with him.  He’s supposed to be a nod to Jacques Vallée who’s a big UFO expert in real life.  But for the sake of the movie why couldn’t he just be able to speak fluent English or cast someone who spoke fluent English?  I guess Spielberg just had to have Francois Truffaut (Dir: The 400 Blows) but apparently he didn’t speak English very well.  Another thing is that I think they try to make Teri Garr (Mr. Mom, Young Frankenstein) out to be a bad guy in this by not having her support Roy but she reacts like any sane person would in that situation.   But these are minor gripes really.

You see Spielberg tried to make a serious alien movie.  Not a horror picture but a “what if this happened in real life” kinda picture.  I think it’s sort of like how there were (and still are) a ton of super hero movies made in the last ten years that try to take the position of “what if this super hero existed in real life” like the X-Men movies or the new Batman pictures.  I think part of the mission of this movie (aside from entertaining) is to rationalize the existence of aliens and alien sightings.  The argument that Spielberg makes in the film is that we’ve never been able to get video of a car or plane crash as it was actually happening.  I think he’s saying that just because we don’t see it doesn’t mean that it’s not there.  But we do have footage of car and plane crashes occurring.  I mean if you want to see a car crash then you can watch it happen in a test lab of any given car company.  He’s not making a totally invalid statement but you can’t just apply it to anything.  I can say that I’ve never seen a centaur but that doesn’t mean that they exist.  The scene that he makes this argument in is about irrefutable evidence that aliens and UFOs exist but we know that cars and planes exist and that they have crashed because we have the aftermath of it.  With UFOs we don’t have anything physical that everyone can touch or see up close.  It’s all stories and photographs that no one can verify are real or not.  We actually have cars and planes that we use every day.  It’s not a very smart argument in my opinion.  But anyway it looks like Spielberg is passing the alien/UFO torch to J.J. Abrams with Super 8 which looks a lot like Close Encounters except the aliens don’t seem friendly.

As for the very end of the film I like the way it was done with shot after shot of the mother ship in space as if to say “wasn’t that a really cool model folks?  Let’s check it out some more”.  It’s also very nicely topped off with a beautiful John Williams score. 

And there you have it, Close Encounters.  Not a terribly exciting film but it’s so nice to look at and it’s crafted with such love that you can overlook the blandness of the script.  Dreyfuss and Dillon help to make this movie as interesting as they can but the special effects, the always kick ass John Williams score and the way of communicating so much passion without the use of dialogue make this a film worth checking out.  I wouldn’t rush out immediately to see it but maybe move it up the ladder a little on your list.

Oh and did you know that the third kind of close encounter is contact.  I had no clue until I looked up an old movie poster for this film and it had on there that the first kind is a sighting, the second is evidence and the third is contact.  I’m pretty sure this isn’t common knowledge and back in the 70’s you couldn’t just look up on the interweb the degrees of close encounters so it just goes to show how much of an alien nut Spielberg is.  

And one more thing that I wasn’t going to mention but what the hell.  Carl Weathers (Rocky I-IV, Predator) has a bit part in this as a military guard and he even has some lines.  That was a pleasant surprise.  And also my man Craig R. Baxley (Dir: Action Jackson, Stone Cold) was a stunt driver in the scene where the cops are chasing the UFOs.