Headscratchers / Close Encounters of the Third Kind

• If you think about it too much, Roy Neary is a terrible parent. The film tries to alleviate this by making his family unlikeable, but he still runs out on his wife and children to gallivant with aliens.
  • To be fair, his wife ran out on him and took the kids with her. He tried to convince her to come back with the kids over the phone, but it sounds like she wouldn't take him back. So in the end he really had nothing left to lose by getting on the mothership.
    • There's also the fact that Roy does try to reconcile things with Ronnie twice in the film but she rejects him both times. There's the phone conversation, but earlier when they had their fight in the bedroom, Roy actually says to Ronnie "I'm really scared, I want you to help me". At this point Roy has understandably become frightened of his own behavior and the fact that he has no idea what's causing it. He reaches out to Ronnie in a literal cry for help, but what does she do? She yells at him about how he's ruining their lives then runs away and locks herself in the bathroom. At that point I think anyone with any kind of compassion would have accepted Roy's plea and gotten him help. Not to mention that throughout the film she's completely dismissive of him, makes virtually no attempt to reach out to him or understand where he's coming from and what he's going through, and just tries to ignore the situation. Ronnie was ultimately self-centered. She was more concerned about her shallow suburban life and keeping up appearances for it than the state of her husband's mental health, and lacked the fortitude to deal with the situation constructively when she was finally forced to confront it: In the end she just yelled at him about it, blamed him for it, and finally, left him. This is why it annoys me when people say that Roy simply abandoned his family: It's an oversimplification of what actually happens in the film.
    • FWIW, their social standing was about all Ronnie had. These are blue-collar people, relying on knowing what to expect from neighbors and friends. This was not about losing a country-club membership, it was more having everyone you knew talking behind your back, no longer giving even cursory moral support. All of a sudden her stable husband no longer goes to work, starts obsessing over building odd shapes, collecting UFO clippings (it was the 70s, no-one took that stuff seriously). Sure Ronnie is shallow, but from her POV, she sees her husband ignoring his family duties, sinking into something he can't or won't explain. Even alcohol or drug addiction was still something iffy back then, and mental illness much moreso. Ronnie had probably been hearing a lot of gossip about her crazy husband, been trying to shelter her family from his behavior, would not have believed the truth had he told it to her; she just did not have it in her to deal with it any more.
    • You're insinuating that Roy was withholding the truth from Ronnie, he wasn't. It's not that he wouldn't explain to her what was happening to him, he couldn't. He was just as clueless about the truth behind his bizarre behavior as she was. He flat out tells her "I don't think I know what's happening to me".
    • Exactly my point. Roy was too afraid of himself to be able to tell her coherently; Ronnie was eventually too burned out to understand.
    • Tell her what though? He didn't know what was happening to him. There was nothing he could have told her outside of what he already did ("I can't describe it- What I'm thinking, and what I'm feeling". And later: "I don't think I know what's happening to me"). Again, you're statement implies that there was something he could have explained to her but did not because of his mental state. What I'm saying is that he literally had no explanation to give her regardless of his mental state, because had no understanding of what was happening to him. He didn't understand it himself, thus, he couldn't explain it to her.
    • It's just from her POV it would be like watching someone with a mental breakdown; it made little sense and after a certain point it was just too much. Maybe if one of the scientists had reached her...
    • Two important points need to be stressed. First, the morning after Roy's encounter, Ronnie is shown clipping a newspaper article stating that many people in the area reported seeing a UFO... then destroying the article. A moment later, when Roy says he just wants to know what's going on, she responds, "Nothing is going on!" Ronnie knows that Roy almost certainly saw something a rational person would conclude is a flying saucer; she has made a conscious choice to ignore it. Later on, during the press conference with the military brass, Roy is very close to taking control of the meeting, pointing out a serious problem with the government's cover story, and calling them out for their patronizing behavior... and then he is derailed when an old farmer claims to have seen Bigfoot. Ronnie's reaction? She smirks, clearly enjoying this. However you look at it, Ronnie is a fairly awful human being.
    • Spielberg himself has said he would be unable to film Close Encounters nowadays, after experiencing being a father he simply couldn't stomach to make a film about somebody leaving their family behind, no matter the circumstances.
  • There's also the problem of the aliens kidnapping people at random (and at least one child while the terrified mother fought to keep him), then studying them, then casually dropping them off years after they'd picked them up-with nary a word of consent from the abductees or news to their loved ones. Sure, they haven't aged, but that would almost make it worse if you were gone long enough for a significant other to be on death's doorstep...or beyond.
    • They're aliens. They may not have any understanding of our family concepts. Perhaps they didn't know how devastating such a kidnapping would be. Hell, maybe they didn't even know we'd interpret it as a kidnapping. For all we know, these sorts of things happen all the time between planets and it's generally understood that those taken will be willing to go along for the ride because they know what's in store, and the aliens had no idea that the people on this particular planet were ignoramuses who would object.
    • They're apparently traveling aliens. They've seen other civilizations and know how to identify if a race is advanced enough to have understanding of personal rights. If their race does not hold the stealing of an intelligent creature as criminal, how are they civilized?
    • For all we know Earth is the first planet with intelligent life they have found in their travels, and the whole situation is as new to them as it is for us.
    • My thoughts exactly, it's perfectly plausible that for the aliens it is also a first conctact scenario.
    • Then why aren't we kidnapping any of them off of their planet?
    • Because (1) the ending made it very clear that the humans are now at peace with them, (2) we don't know how dangerous they would be if not peaceful, and wouldn't want to find out, (3) we have enough problems of our own, and (4) we are aware of the family concept and probably most humans would think twice about kidnapping an innocent young creature that may have loved ones. Maybe not in some militaries, but #1 covers that.
    • Also, we don't have spaceships.
    • If the aliens have no concept of human concepts, they shouldn't be interfering with the lives of humans. That is just irresponsible.
    • This troper muses that the aliens are on the level of Victorian explorers, who thought nothing of picking up a few living specimens here and there to take home. At least they had the decency to give most of them back.
    • One of the major problems when you start dealing with the question of Blue-and-Orange Morality is that, realistically, you have no freaking idea what aliens would consider "proper" or "improper." I mean, how could you? So, if you treat the question with the kind of intellectual rigor in your fiction that you would in real life, you don't have a lot left to work with to make the story relatable to your audience, if you follow me. If you want the story to be accessible, you have to disregard the notion of alien ethics to at least a certain degree.
    • Not realizing or at least suspecting that a species whose offspring are born small, fragile, and few in number would be inherently protective of their children, and freak out if they went missing, isn't just Blue-and-Orange Morality: it's outright stupid. Reproduction is paramount for any organism that natural selection hasn't eliminated, no matter what planet it's from, and the mere recognition that human babies can't feed themselves should suffice to prove we're a K-selected species for whom offspring are precious.
    • The whole purpose of the project (theirs and ours) was to establish communication. Now that they've got Roy and the other astronauts on their ship there'll be an opportunity for that kind of cultural info exchange. They should work out a simple code with those musical tones so that people can be invited (and be able to RSVP) and not simply snatched.
    • Assuming the other astronauts even got on the ship with Roy. Though they're not seen when the Mothership is taking off, we never see them board it either; and Roy was the only one of them that we actually see the aliens take and embrace.
• Why is this movie so long? The story takes about 80 minutes or so to tell and yet this lasts over 2 hours.Nothing is added by the extra length. It's all just padding.
  • Well. Besides story the film has to succesfully convey the varied emotions, impulses and reactions of the people affected by the phenomenon.
  • I'd like to point out that the "Why is this movie so long?" Troper above is obviously invoking the trope Just Here for Godzilla.
  • You need scenes of excitement, confusion, anger, wonder, anticipation, fear, resentment, distrust, curiosity, denial and faith. To give an epic movie which is trying to depict an epic and momentous event the appropriate emotional and experiential core, then you need scenes to explore all these aspects to be given all the time that they need to be authentic and to transcend the story itself at the same time as providing an emotional counterpart to the plot detail.
• This movie got a lot of people killed in Independence Day.
  • Just because the two movies' time gap of launching is quite close does not imply these two are canonly interconnected.
• Here's something that has always annoyed me. The iconic five tones (Bah ^bi bah _bom baaaaaaa.) are sung early in the movie by a crowd of Indian(?) people who heard it. Here's the problem: It isn't the right notes! Editing them with TV Tropes coding is a bit weird, but it sounds like they are singing Bah ^Da (pause) Bah ^Yah Tay. What makes it even more confusing is that in the next scene, when the guys play back the Indian chanting, they play the correct five notes, so suddenly their recording is Bah ^Da bah _Yah Tay. It's a minor thing, but it drives me up the blippin' wall.
  • You're not the only one. Ethnomusicologist head explody time.
  • I worked this one out. Remember, the song is repeated over an over again, so the starting note is arbitrary. Take the standard notes but start on the 4th note as you transcribed it: _bom baaaaaaa Bah ^bi bah. There you are: sing it with a Hindi accent and you've got it's Bah ^Da (pause) Bah ^Yah Tay.
  • That was filmed in Hal, a village about 30 miles from Mumbai. The people are Marathis. The production manager was Baba Shaik, and the chant is directed by a real choral leader — who unfortunately kept getting the notes wrong, which may be part of what happened.
• Does Jillian really expect the government will let her keep those photographs she took of the aliens?
• Why do these aliens, who randomly kidnapped people for years, think they can drop everyone off at once with nary a slap on the wrist?
  • Do we worry about repercussions from the animals and insects we take to study?
  • They a) might not consider worthy of note (they are aliens, after all), b) are in a position where humanity can't really give them much more than a slap on the wrist.
  • Maybe all those kidnapped people were taken by a rogue faction of the aliens. Off-screen during the film, the alien leaders found out and decided to return everyone as a peace gesture. Maybe what the mothership was trying to explain during the "wild signals" scene was that they had punished the aliens responsible for the kidnappings. Maybe the alien responsible for the kidnappings was Loki, in which case the alien Lacombe signaled with was Thor.
  • I always assumed that shortly after the kidnapping, the aliens asked the humans if they wanted to stay or be returned immediately. Of course, giving that they also kidnapped children makes the whole thing seem less benevolent, but perhaps they didn't quite understand that a small human child isn't quite capable of making such decisions and isn't yet fully mentally developed.
  • The aliens seem to communicate psychically - it's possible that they didn't think they were 'kidnapping people' because they were planting in people's mind's the equivalent of 'hey folks, we've just arrived at this planet. we'd like to get some idea of how you folks operate. Do you fancy coming with us for a bit" and as far as they were concerned, the humans' response was 'yeah, sounds cool. When can we start?"
  • I get the blue and orange morality of the kidnapping a human from the aliens perspective. I DON'T understand why - knowing the aliens were capable of such a thing - the government would willingly hand over more people to the aliens, when those people where obviously acting under some type of compulsion. What's to prevent them from doing something equally heinous to the new recruits because they don't know any better? And the recruits are clearly not able to give informed consent to the risk.
    • The government didn't allow the compelled people to go with the aliens. The bulk of the last half of the movie is the military doing everything nonlethal they can to keep those people away from the aliens. Roy is the only one of the "voyagers" that is not a government agent.
  • They sort of answer this question? When the mothership opens up and we see the soldiers come out, two of the scientists look at each other and say "Einstein was right." Probably they were talking about his theory of space-time. For the abducted humans and the aliens, it may have just been a couple of hours or days. Space travel and light speed is a conversation we're still having. Granted, as the ones who made the damn spaceships and had the tech to do this in the first place, the aliens should have damn well knew that an hour to the abducted people could be decades or centuries (one of the women who came out was wearing what looked like early 1900 dress) planet-side. But it's possible that the extent of time the humans were on the ship didn't feel like what it was to us.
• It beggars belief that a French translator is the only individual in a room full of people working at an astronomical scientific facility to instantly recognize that the numbers being received from space are coordinates. Of all scientists, astronomers are probably the ones most used to handling coordinates in the first place as they are crucial to sky observation! The way they are shown on screen, anyone with even a passing knowledge of geography would recognize them as latitude and longitude. And there seriously isn't a map lying around such a facility? (One could also ask how the aliens knew the human system of longitude and latitude to begin with, but the fact we later learn that they have a number of pilots aboard the mothership likely means they learned about the co-ordinates system from them.)
  • You could assume that they were in violation of the "when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras" rule. Everything happening was so bizarre that something as simple and down-to-earth as latitude and longitude numbers didn't occur to them when it should.
  • Spielberg probably figured the visual gag of serious-minded scholars rolling a huge globe down a hallway was worth a little Fridge Logic.
• Speaking of latitude and longitude, how did the aliens come up with longitudinal coordinates to match our own? For latitude, there's a well-defined astronomical equator, i.e. the section perpendicular to the sun during the equinoxes, so it's plausible they would have been able to come up with latitudinal coordinates that matched ours by using the equator as their zero. In contrast, there is no "natural" zero for longitude, it's arbitarily set to the position of Greenwich in England. There's absolutely no reason the aliens would have picked this as their longitudinal zero.
  • Considering that the aliens have abducted many people in the past, there must be a time where the aliens managed to obtain some info about Earth Geometry from one of their subjects.
• Roy drives his car from Indiana to Wyoming, but one scene while he is in Wyoming shows his car to have a Wyoming license plate.
  • The book cleared this up; he flew to Wyoming and rented a car there.
    • He even states offhandedly in the movie that it's "just a rental".
  • Also note, Ronnie already took the station wagon earlier, so the one in Wyoming couldn't be Roy's.