CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND

"He says the sun came out last night. He says it sang to him."

Steven Spielberg is, in a lot of ways, like Quentin Tarantino. It's as if they were brothers, Spielberg walking out the front door and Tarantino blowing the back door off the hinges with a home-made bomb, and screaming in glee as he ran out. They're both geniuses, in my opinion, and their artistry has left a permanent, and overwhelmingly great influence, on modern American cinema.


Where Tarantino still loves violence and the seedier aspects of criminals and killers, Spielberg loves being using his imagination. That's what CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND is; an exhibition of Spielberg's creativity and ability to floor audiences. He is the Victor Fleming of our time (well, at this point Fleming is the Spielberg of his generation), a director who knows that combining melodrama with the best visual magic the industry has to offer will attract the masses, and make a timeless film.


Overshadowed by its sci-fi counterpart of 1977 (a $10 million indy film called STAR WARS), CLOSE ENCOUNTERS flew as under the radar as a film that grossed over a quarter billion dollars possibly can. It is a brilliant film nonetheless, despite it meandering into the occasional tedium. Richard Dreyfuss, fresh off his hugely successful collaboration with Spielberg in 1975's JAWS, stars as Roy Neary, an every-man with a couple of kids and a rocky marriage. His mediocre living situation turns into something on a whole new level when he witnesses the effects of the human race's first contact with aliens, on his truck. He becomes obsessed with the extraterrestrials, seeing the same image in his dreams over and over again.


He meets Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon), a single mother whose young son is abducted by a UFO. While they frenetically race toward the mountain they've both seen in their 'visions', scientists and the government attempt (sometimes fruitlessly, but in the end awe-inspiringly) to track down the visitors. While ET gets most of the love in the film community (and I don't deny that it's a better movie), CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is compared with Spielberg's 1982 masterwork. This film is all about the imagery and the ideas presented, like most sci-fi masterpieces (2001, CHILDREN OF MEN, BLADE RUNNER) are, and story second. Really, the only similarities these films share, other than Spielberg directing and having aliens invade, is that the visitors are friendly and curious (the opposite of, say, WAR OF THE WORLDS, which is also awesome). They're both terrific films on their own merits, for their own reasons and ambitions.

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