Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) – S. Spielberg

Forty years later, Spielberg’s examination of the events leading up to our first encounter with aliens (the third kind = actual contact beyond sightings or discovering physical traces) still retains a sense of child-like wonder at new and amazing things.  In fact, the film impacted me so much when I was a child myself that I ended up taking a pilgrimage to Devils Tower, Wyoming, in the early 1990s – the butte is awesome enough on its own but its association with this film adds an extra weirdness factor that makes it even more compelling.  And, yes, compelling is the operant word here, because the film depicts how, after an encounter of the first kind, a number of humans (including chiefly Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon) are drawn to this spot where it appears that the aliens will land.  But the film starts a few weeks earlier and shows us how the obsession with aliens takes over the lives of these ordinary people, interspersed with shots of Professor Francois Truffaut’s academic investigation into alien encounters. Of course, the special effects (coordinated by Douglas Trumbull, who had earlier done 2001: A Space Odyssey) are great (and old-school, not CGI) and the five-tone message that unlocks the ability to communicate with the aliens became seared into our brains (although the rest of John Williams’ score is less memorable).  Overall, the film makes you want to believe in (friendly) aliens, even though Spielberg leaves it for viewers to go deeper into the ideas and outcomes introduced here.