...a sci-fi adventure film of realistic proportions, where the interactions of its characters are equally important as the wizardry of the special visual effects.
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"...the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition -- and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives: to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain."
--Joseph Conrad, 1898.
In the past half century, only a handful of science-fiction films have had a significant impact on the direction of the sci-fi genre. In the 1950s "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "The War of the Worlds" set trends for thematic content and special effects. In 1968 "2001: A Space Odyssey" was a landmark achievement for its visual and intellectual influences. "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters" came along in 1977, the former applying Earth's mythology to space, the latter emphasizing mankind's purported real experiences with space aliens. Since then, only "E.T.--The Extra-Terrestrial" and "Contact" have come close to approaching such "capacity for delight and wonder," and both of those films clearly owed their allegiance to their earlier, pioneering progenitors. It was appropriate, then, that Columbia TriStar release Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters" in a two-disc Collector's Edition to commemorate this very special motion picture.
A best friend of mine once told me that while teaching a graduate class in Film Study to students mostly in their twenties, he had an experience that to him seemed shocking. He had tried to make a verbal reference to "Close Encounters" and found that while all of his students had heard of the film, almost none of them had actually seen it! As one of the students explained it to him, "Close Encounters" had been made before most of them were born. If they had seen it at all, it would have been on a pan-and-scan tape of dubious distinction. All the more reason, then, to rejoice at the release of this new DVD edition with its widescreen image and remastered Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 sound.
One of the scientists in the story, Mr. Lacombe, played by the late French director Francois Truffaut, describes the film characters' situation by saying, "These are ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances." The ordinary people in particular are a power company repairman, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), his impatient wife (Teri Garr), and house full of bratty children living in Muncie, Indiana; and a mother, Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon), and her three-year-old son, Barry (Cary Guffey), living in a farmhouse in the neighboring countryside. Something is happening to them, but they don't know what or why. Both have had a recent close encounter with alien spacecraft, and as a result both are having premonitions of things very significant about to occur. Roy is obsessed with building mountains out of mole hills, or, to be more precise, out of mashed potatoes, shaving cream, and most of his backyard and neighborhood. Jillian, on the other hand, is not only seeing visions of the same mountain, she's chasing after Barry, who has apparently been carried off by the galactic visitors.
The man behind all this delight and wonder was hot off the success of "Jaws" and not about to stop there. Written and directed by Steven Spielberg, "Close Encounters" continues to inspire awe and admiration, even after twenty-odd years. The movie was produced before the digital special-effects era of fancy computers, so all of the spacecraft and other sights had to be made by hand. Fortunately, the chief model maker was the same guy who had worked on "2001," Douglas Trumbull, and he pulled out all the stops. The gigantic mother ship rising from behind Devil's Tower is still spectacularly awesome, and the scenes in Roy's pickup truck at the railroad crossing and in Jillian's farmhouse during Barry's abduction are still genuinely exciting and scary.
John Williams' heroic and atmospheric music remains classic, in the same league with his "Star Wars" efforts. Hints of "When You Wish Upon a Star" in the closing scene remind us not only of the wonder that makes children of us all but harks back to Roy's revelation that he "grew up with Pinocchio." The invention of a basic tonal vocabulary for communicating with the aliens remains uniquely clever, and the attempts by the government to cover up the strange happenings in the sky continue to be prescient. And over all the characters looms the ominous presence of Devil's Tower, a huge, dark, mysterious obelisk shape, quite likely Spielberg's homage to Kubrick and "2001." All in all, "Close Encounters" is a masterful motion picture, a sci-fi adventure film of realistic proportions, where the interactions of its characters are equally important as the wizardry of the special visual effects.
Three years after its initial release, Spielberg reedited the film in a 1980 Special Edition. Apparently, the director was under the gun to get the first version out in a certain amount of time, requiring him to make a few compromises. The Special Edition allowed him to add unused scenes he'd always liked; for instance, ones explaining Roy's motivations for his obsessions and ones developing the personality of the wife. However, Columbia also requested that Spielberg film new scenes revealing the inside of the mother ship, something Spielberg didn't particularly want to do; he favored leaving the inside of the ship a mystery. But movie audiences preferred it otherwise. On this DVD release Spielberg seems to have finally gotten the film he'd always wanted, mostly the 1980 edition but with the original 1977 ending; plus an extensive array of deleted scenes on the bonus disc. Like most of the public, though, I actually liked the interior shots of the mother ship and miss them in this DVD rendering; but, as I say, Spielberg had never wanted them, only adding them to the Special Edition on the insistence of Columbia. So, you have to go to disc two to watch the Special Edition ending. That appears to be the only major controversy involved in the set's production, but it's one that might have been avoided by adding the simple choice of an option button on the main menu. Nobody ever asks me.
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