I found myself rewatching Close Encounters of the Third Kind this week. It’s been a while since I last saw it. Like many, I thought of the movie as slow paced but on rewatching it I was reminded how truly brilliant it is. The movie falls at an interesting intersection of movie making from the late 60s, early 70s to the transformation of style and substance that was taking place in the late 70s and early 80s. It really feels like the best of the two eras.
Released in November 1977, it is amazing how well the special effects hold up 46 years later! I know more than my fair share about FX and at one time or the other, I’ve probably read or watched a background piece on virtually any of the FX shots. Still, enough time has passed that I’m no longer confident on how they were all achieved. CGI is cool, and I admire the work that goes into those CG but I still find that I hanker for some old-school FX not only because they offered a greater diversity of solutions but because so many of them hold up as good or better than today’s typical CG.
The movie deserves a dissertation but today I’ll only note a few quick observations. (Needless to say: there are some spoilers. If for some reason you haven’t seen the movie, stop reading and do yourself a favor and watch it.)
- Unless I missed it, they movie never once says the word, ‘Aliens’ (or extraterrestrials).
- Of the people who were ‘invited’ by the aliens, only three escape being held prisoners from the government: Roy Neary (the main protagonist), Jillian Guiler and Larry Butler. Larry doesn’t have much backstory. He just happens to be one of the three who escape and makes their way over the rock features of Devil’s Tower. Alas for poor Larry: he gets tuckered out and for some reason doesn’t duck behind a rock like the other two as the government helicopter flies overhead and gasses him. Larry observes that the helicopters are ‘just crop dusting’ as they fly overhead spraying something. I can’t imagine why Larry would suddenly think that the helicopters that have been chasing them for some time are now innocuously crop dusting (on a rocky mountain side)! And even if he really thought it was just crop dusting – why he’d allow himself to be bathed in some pesticides. I feel for Larry. So close and yet so far.
- When the Mothership comes over Devil’s Tower it apparently is flying upside down because as it comes over the government’s facility it rotates 180 degrees and eventually lowers a ramp for people (and extraterrestrials) to come and go. I can accept the idea that these aliens can control the gravity within their own ship, but does that mean that some percentage of the inhabitants are upside down as they touch down? Or do they all scramble to change the surface that they are standing on as the ship rotates? ‘Quick! We’re flipping! Run to the ceiling!‘
- For as warm and fuzzy as the movie makes you want to feel, the aliens are kind of assholes.
– When they take the little boy from his mother, they do so just about as dramatically as they could: with massive bright lights beaming through the house, all manner of appliances turning on and off – rattling and running while something apparently attempts to come down the chimney and up from the basement before being blocked. – The kid takes it in stride but the mother is understandably traumatized.
– They also abduct people from their own era (at least the 30s and 40s) and don’t bring them home until the 1980s (or, ‘present day’ as the movie titles indicate.) Yeah, they’ve not aged because of Special Relativity, but their lives and loved ones as they knew them are over / old or dead. And when the people wander off the ship, they sure as hell looked stunned and none-to-happy. Maybe there was some ‘probing’ going on?
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