close encounters of the third kind

4.5/10  - Directed by Steven Spielberg - 1982 - 135 minutes

Months after my first watch of Close Encounters of the Third Kind I still have yet to hear any justification of its simplistic and genuinely substanceless plotline. What was, at its release, lauded and competed with Star Wars: A New Hope for an Academy Award, is from a contemporary perspective totally overwhelmed by bizarre and outlandish writing and acting. Outlandishness is not inherently a negative thing, and in some cases a movie may benefit from a particularly absurd concept. Unfortunately, the creative choices made in Close Encounters are not admirable, they’re just strange, and quite frankly, make for a rather unimpressive film. In the case of something like the mental image of Devil’s Tower, a shared memory that is held by all the film's characters who have had a "close encounter," it’s obvious that Spielberg was looking for a creative plot device to draw the main characters to the site of the final encounter. And yet, the way this all ultimately plays out makes me question if Spielberg can in any film competently depict the extraterrestrial. The silhouette of this majestic geological feature is

When initially thinking about what specifically offended me in the plot, I believed that it was the childlike hopefulness that the prospect of extraterrestrial life is approached with. But why should a hopeful story of alien contact offend anyone? A grim plotline is not vital to making a sci-fi film work. No, it was not the innocence of the extraterrestrials and their potential relationship to humanity that I objected to but rather the way in which these aspects were handled. The most ridiculous thing about a movie so overtly addressing a major question in humanity (the possibility of alien contact) is that it handles its own answer with absolutely no nuance. Every obstacle placed in front of them is done away with as if it had never existed. The government conspiratorially covering up the alien UFO interactions across the globe, already an exhaustingly basic and simplistic plotline, is suddenly resolved in an overly drawn out and dramatized musical communication sequence between the spaceship and the lab, placing the government instead as a misguided force that gently connects with alien forces. And what is the fate of the erratic blue collar protagonist, Neary’s, family? His wife, so deliberately and stereotypically portrayed as a nagging, disbelieving wife holding him back from extra terrestrial discovery, takes his children away and his family is ignored for the rest of the movie. 

Unfortunately, the performances of Richard Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary and Melinda Dillon’s Jillian Guiler are little redemption for the film. Both, particularly in Dreyfuss’ case, are heavily one note and overdone. Dreyfuss’ portrayal of Roy Neary is over-expressive almost to the point of cartoonishness. 

Close Encounters of the Third Kind echoes a frequent occurrence in Spielberg’s career; a multi million dollar waste of nice lighting.