Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Stephen Spielberg's masterpiece, that's right, and as I showed my wife this film for (her) first time, I was amazed at how dated the thing seemed to be.

What was amazing when I was younger is now . . . kitchy!

From the toy robot that starts up to the keyboard that flashes lights across a billboard to a visiting space ship.

I mean, these guys were holding up microphones attached to hand held CASSETTE players for goodness sake!

Remember those?

That was cool! It was like an amalgam of seventies technology.

My favourite part in the movie was when the scientists were just figuring out that what was being transmitted to Earth was coordinates . . . (OK, nevermind that the aliens would use a HUMAN mapping system and then transmit it in code for us to decipher - that falls under the topic of "suspension of disbelief" and is entirely another discussion altogether) . . . and then these guys go into another room, knock a giant globe off its support, ROLL the monstrous thing into another room, and then begin to measure it with a metal compass!

I thought . . . jeez! Today they'd just go to Google Earth and have a picture of the Devil's Tower downloaded in about two seconds!

So . . . in order to appreciate the movie, and to take it for what it was, I had to, in a way, view it as a person would view a period piece. For example, nobody wonders why they don't use semi-automatic weapons in Pirates of the Carribean, now, do they? Of course not! You set the technology in the era in which the movie is set.

I did that with Close Encounters of the Third Kind . . . I imagined that the movie had just been made, only it was set in 1977 - as kind of an "historical" piece about an alien-human contact. Thus, in an instant, the movie (for me at least!) became immensely enjoyable again, instead of instilling in me a sense of tragic nostalgia for an innocence long vanished in the deluge of decades of decadence.

(Like the assonance?)

And, of course, regardless of how you watch this film, it still stands as a legend in sci-fi: in that it fully explores that purely human drive to investigate and explore, and it still remains one of the few alien-human contact movies to have absolutely NO overtones of "invade and conquer."

Also, as I stated in the first paragraph, even though I like several other Spielberg films better (E.T., Raiders of Lost Ark, AI) and hate several others much more (Empire of the Sun - RETCH!), I still feel that this one can probably considered his true masterpiece, if only for the sheer "crafting" of the movie itself.


VG