When I was fourteen, I saw it as an attempt by Spielberg to get in on the Star Wars craze.
I don't know how widespread belief in UFOs was back then. When I was about ten, I bought a UFO magazine and was astonished that adults believed in that stuff. I must have been kind of a dumb kid because whenever my fifth grade class got a student teacher, the poor girl was given the task of trying to teach me math. One of them convinced me to start crossing my sevens like a German and discussed her belief in "ancient astronauts".
I went to an alternative school in sixth grade. One teacher taught nothing but paranormal crap. He brought his books about bigfoot, ghosts and flying saucers and would simply read them to the class. Some of it seemed stupid to me, but I assumed it must have made some kind of sense.
In junior high, other kids were annoyed when teachers would get off the subject and start talking about space aliens, but I found it interesting.
An otherwise intelligent teacher started talking about Easter Island. Aliens obviously carved the statues with lasers, but how did they move them? A couple of kids guessed they used cranes or trucks. The teacher got impatient. They wouldn't need that stuff. They would just use an anti-gravity ray.
So. Close Encounters. They had posters explaining that "the third kind" meant actually meeting the aliens. It fed the UFO craze. Why, even Jimmy Carter once reported a UFO.
The plot was a little thin and it was two hours and fifteen minutes long. Much of it was a horror movie. The aliens had this kind of semi-religious significance but thought nothing of abducting a small child. In one scene, the four-year-old stands in the middle of a road at night on a blind curve. A family of bumpkins is right there with their truck and they do nothing to get him onto the shoulder. That may be why the aliens decided to intervene. Later, a crowd gathers in the same spot walking in the road at night without a thought.
It's been pointed out that the "scientists" in this are all white men, which, in real life, wouldn't say much for white men that they're the only ones who fall for this stuff. Spielberg's movies have always been that way---The Color Purple was an outlier. It's also been pointed out that those New Hollywood guys---Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Bogdanovich, et al---were terrible sexists. They regarded their wives as helpmeets, which might explain something about Richard Dreyfus' character's abusive marriage to Teri Garr.
Originally, Spielberg planned on using music from Pinocchio, "When You Wish Upon a Star", at the end, but apparently thought better of it.
It never made sense to me how "music" and flashing lights was supposed to communicate anything.
I don't like Spielberg. I've avoided his movies for years, but I'll watch one now and then. I always expect to grudgingly enjoy them but I'm disappointed every time.
With Francois Truffaut and Bob Balaban as his French interpreter. Balaban's cousin, Burt Balaban, made Stranger from Venus in 1954. Richard Dreyfus's nephew plays one of his sons.
Melinda Dillon as a mother who doesn't keep much of an eye on her pre-schooler. Even at the end when she gets him back from the aliens, she ignores him and takes pictures of the UFO. She rushes to get a better angle and glances back only once to see if he's still running after her. Stuff like this bothers me more in Spielberg movies where everything is so carefully contrived.
If I were in the middle of Wyoming for the big meeting with the space aliens, I wouldn't wear a tie. I think I'd dress for comfort and I'd want to be ready to flee into the desert if it turned into a Mars Attacks thing. Maybe keep a motorcycle stashed somewhere. And learn to ride a motorcycle.
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