What's the AFI project, you ask? For more information, or if you just enjoy my bemused ramblings, read here:http://www.spout.com/blogs/pippin06/archive/2008/3/1/25756.aspx
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is on the following AFI lists:
The Original Top 100 (#64)
100 Most Heart-Pounding Movies (#31)
100 Most Inspiring Movies (#58)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (hereinafter called "Close Encounters") is another one of those films that I watched and rewatched throughout my childhood. I have also owned it in various forms (the test passes!) and bought the super-fancy-deluxe-anniversary edition in advance of viewing it again for this project. To me, Close Encounters is something like ET for adults, or ET with a mystery-type beginning, and yet, it's a film that stands on its own merits. It's a multilayered exploration and discussion of many themes, from faith to preserving innocence to opening the mind to extreme possibilities, and it's also a classic film that has held up well, despite the timing of its introduction in the late 70s.
In Close Encounters, Richard Dreyfuss plays Roy Neary, an electrical lineman who, as the title of the film would suggest, encouters a UFO in rural Indiana. He's not alone. Jillian (Melinda Dillon) and her son see the odd lights in the sky and experience the odd noises, too, and, eventually, Barry is taken away. Roy, who steadily becomes more obsessed with the quest to make sense of what he saw, up-ends his family, including his wife (Teri Garr) and three children, by sculpting shapes in his mashed potatoes ("This means something; this is important") and, eventually, by replicating the famed Devil's Tower in Wyoming in his living room by means of garbage and refuse from his lawn. In the meantime, a French researcher named LaCombe (Francois Truffault) and his translator (Bob Balaban) have found odd crash sites from airplanes missing decades earlier, and the US government appears to have knowledge of these strange happenings, as they stage a false viral outbreak in the vicinity of Devil's Tower to keep curious onlookers away from the area. All the while, people who have had these close encounters themselves, Roy and Jillian included, seem drawn to this location, as the researchers and government officials team up to construct close encounters of their own.
The reason Close Encounters works is that it is, in ways, fresh and different, even as it recycles some of the motifs from scifis of the 50s and 60s. At its core, it's about aliens and outer space, flying their spaceships and making contact with Earth and with humans, but, for once, they're not attacking. Spielberg would catch quite a bevy of flack later in his career for making all of his science fiction pictures about friendly aliens, but, it's potentially flawed to limit the ideal of visitors from other worlds to the possibility that they would only be hostile.
The picture also expounds on the idea of communication, through a universal language that has long been accepted as such: music. John Williams, movie composer extraordinaire and Stevie's go-to music man, created a wonderful score punctuated by five iconic notes that symbolize something humans seek in everyday life: connection. Since the story concept is Spielberg's (he is credited with the screenplay), and since he was also the director, these bits of subtlety and grace resulted in a wonderful, layered tale that truly engages the viewer and makes him or her (and especially me) as curious and as attracted to the UFO mystery as Roy and Jillian.
Spielberg's unquestioned skill is unmistakable here. Like in Jaws, again operating on a small, if blown, budget, Stevie used the implication of what was not visually there to ratchet up the spooky factor. Scenes would go completely quiet, bereft of all noise, including underscore. The expressions on the child actor who played Barry (Cary Guffey) were pricelessly coaxed out of him. Also, the visual effects in this film are quite stunning for the year in which the film was produced; they look almost as seamless as present-day CGI, and digitally rendered versions of the film do little more than accentuate the clarity of what was already there.
The performances, even if not Oscar-worthy and a bit clunky at times (Dreyfuss and Garr are a highly unlikely couple and completely lack chemistry), are genuine; the reactions are organic and expected, and none of it feels hammy or over-the-top. Close Encounters works also, then, because it feels so natural - if UFOs did truly descend to Earth in any measurable way, witnessed by many instead of a few crackpots with fuzzy cameras, I imagine similar reactions would erupt from onlookers and their beleaguered families. The touches of tying the UFOs and strange discoveries in the film to other interesting supernatural mythology, such as the Bermuda Triangle, were a nice touch on Spielberg's part too.
In short, this movie is just fun, like so many of Spielberg's blockbuster films, but it also has his undeniably artistic touch that accents and accentuates the story he is telling. The film moves a bit slowly, but it has a distinctive atmosphere that people are either going to be drawn into and fascinated by or are not going to be interested in because they are not quite predisposed to UFO phenomena. I love Close Encounters though because it is an excellent story and a great piece of filmmaking. It's not Spielberg's masterpiece, but it's still quite entertaining for scifi buffs like me. I think the film warrants an 8.5 (between minor flaws/very good and perfectly entertaining) on the patented ratings scale. I also think the film merits its rankings on the AFI lists - the film is spooky enough to be quite heart-pounding, and the friendly alien motif provides some messages of hope and wonderment that truly inspire. Sadly, however, the film did not make the AFI's revised greatest list, instead being replaced by Network (which moved up two spots). I guess the film isn't for everyone, but one should at least give the film a chance: watch it and see if experiencing these close encounters are as magical for you as they have always been for me.