Subject: Review: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

From: James Brundage <[email-masked]>
Date: 1 Jun 2001 01:34:51 GMT

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
A film review by James Brundage
Copyright 2001 filmcritic.com
filmcritic.com

Around a quarter century ago, a nerdy little kid fresh off the success
of some shark movie decided he wanted to turn his focus to little green
men.  And somehow he turned out one of those rare films that imprints
itself into the cultural psyche so far as to be able to be referenced by
just about anyone (whether they've seen it or not).

But just in case you really are from another planet and have no clue
just what the hell I'm talking about, the year was 1977, the director
was Steven Spielberg, and the movie was Close Encounters of the Third
Kind.  Per the film, there are three kinds of alien contact, two of
which nobody really cares about.  The third kind is the close, personal
relationship forged between man and alien when a person gets abducted...
and, well, that's the focus of most of this film.

Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) starts out as an angry father in a job he
doesn't seem to care for all that much, all of which is changed when
some friendly aliens give him a sunburn and give his town a lightshow
that puts concert pyrotechnics to shame.  This experience makes Roy a
little off-kilter; he begins sculpting shapes he's never seen, having
the feeling that he should be going somewhere soon.

In the meantime Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut) is going about the
globe picking up planes and ships that disappeared a half century ago,
and he finds them in the middle of the desert, to boot.  And with
mysterious fly-bys happening to modern day aircraft around the world...
well we don't need rocket scientists to figure out what's going on.

Close Encounters is really such a simple movie that it doesn't warrant a
helluva lot of discussion.  Were it not able to hit our cultural
pressure points so well, it probably would have faded off the of
cinematic map -- but Spielberg is nothing if not adept at punching our
buttons and making us puppets in his hands, and Close Encounters is no
exception.  While, storywise and on filmmaking levels, Close Encounters
might not be the greatest film ever, I'll be damned if when you're
watching the aliens communicate through music, you don't feel like it
is.

RATING:  ****

|------------------------------|
 \ ***** Perfection             \
  \ **** Good, memorable film    \
   \ *** Average, hits and misses \
    \ ** Sub-par on many levels    \
     \ * Unquestionably awful       \
      |------------------------------|

MPAA Rating: PG

Director: Steven Spielberg
Producer: Julia Phillips, Michael Phillips
Writer: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon

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