Rewatch: Close Encounters Of The Third Kind

Warning! Massive spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!

I spent Star Wars Day evening this year watching the other big sci-fi film from 1977, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. This is a movie I had watched multiple times as a child, but probably hadn’t watched in twenty years, so it almost felt like watching it for the first time. Sure, I remembered a lot of the iconic scenes and of course the classic musical tune that the humans use to communicate with the aliens, but watching this movie as an adult gave me a fresh perspective on this film.

I feel like Close Encounters has a weird place in Spielberg’s catalog of hits. Everyone’s heard of it, due in part to its unusual name but mostly because of those famous five musical notes, but I feel like it’s one that most people today would say they haven’t seen. It’s also slower paced and a little more uneven than we’re used to Steven Spielberg blockbusters being. In the end I walked away feeling that I liked the movie, but didn’t love it. It has some sequences I absolutely love, and some plot points I hated.

Because it came out the same year as Star Wars, and because of the famous bet that Spielberg and Lucas made before their films came out, it can’t escape being compared with Star Wars. But these movies couldn’t be more different. Star Wars was a shoot-em-up modern day feature length sci-fi serial, whereas Close Encounters is a very slow, cerebral sci-fi movie, so much so that Spielberg doesn’t even bother fully explaining the title in the movie. Contact would be the most apt comparison to make, with Star Trek: The Motion Picture being a close second.

The story bounces back and forth between a U.N. team investigating unusual UFO-related events around the world, and two people in Indiana who have life changing UFO experiences of their own. Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) sees several UFOs in the middle of the night on his way to work. Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) loses her young son to an alien abduction. After their close encounters, both begin obsessing over what they later realize is Devils Tower in Wyoming. When they arrive there they find that the U.N. team has also arrived having followed clues left behind by the aliens.

One thing that sets this movie apart from other sci-fi films is how realistic it feels. The alien encounters that Roy and Jillian experience mimic many tales that have been told over the years by people who claim to have had close encounters with UFOs/aliens. The government denials and cover-ups come across as believable. The aliens are depicted as largely benevolent, though they are also shown to have committed clear acts of aggression in the forms of kidnapping and property theft. It’s also not entirely clear just how much of Roy’s and Jillian’s actions are of their own volition as they’re clearly shown to be undergoing some form of alien-induced obsessive compulsion.

The film also feels like a transitionary moment in film history between sci-fi films of old and the modern blockbuster. The Devils Tower set at the end looks like something out of an early James Bond film, and the P.A. announcer during those scenes sounds like he would be perfectly at home in a 1950’s atomic bomb movie. On the other hand the scene in which Jillian’s son is abducted is the prototypical modern blockbuster thriller scene. Seriously, the third act of Signs has got to be entirely based on that scene. It’s thrilling and at the same time extremely terrifying. The part with the screws coming out of the floor grate is tense, and all of the orange light outside the home is fantastic. On the other hand, the famous “mashed potatoes” scene has been parodied so many times that it’s lost its power to me. I can’t help but think of Weird Al in UHF and that just ruins the somberness of the scene.

I kind of love that they don’t really spell out for the audience what’s happening with the music at the end. It’s simply apparent that this is how the aliens communicate with the humans, and it’s so wonderfully unorthodox for a big budget Hollywood movie.

What I don’t like is the fact that Roy deserts his wife and children first to go off in search of Devils Tower, and then to go off with the aliens. Based on the fact that the Navy pilots are being returned after more than thirty years, Roy may never see his family again. This didn’t sit well with me, nor did I like Roy kissing Jillian at the end. Apparently Spielberg regrets those things too. In doing press for War Of The Worlds a few years ago, Spielberg said:

Now, that was before I had kids. That was 1977. So I wrote that blithely. Today, I would never have the guy leaving his family and going on the mother ship. I would have the guy doing everything he could to protect his children…

It’s funny that came up around the time of War Of The Worlds, because in rewatching Close Encounters I couldn’t help but think that if Spielberg remade this he would cast Tom Cruise as Roy and set up the character as being estranged from his family before the UFO encounter.