YMMV / Close Encounters of the Third Kind

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is Roy a lovable everyman on a grand spiritual journey? Or a selfish, unstable jerk who abandoned his wife and children?
  • Is Ronnie a sympathetic woman trying (and failing) to deal with her husband's eccentric behavior? Or a shallow, dismissive, self-centered woman that unfairly blamed Roy for destroying their family?
  • Did the aliens abduct dozens of people against their will in order to study our species, or were most of those they took with them and returned to Earth (decades later and un-aged) people like Roy who went willingly and were just as fascinated by the aliens as the aliens were by us? Since the aliens captured airplanes in mid-flight and entire ships from the middle of the ocean, it seems as though at least some of the people on board probably didn't want to be there.
• Award Snub:
  • It received eight Academy Award nominations and won two, but Best Picture wasn't one of them.
  • Richard Dreyfuss wasn't nominated for Best Actor. However, he wound up winning the award for The Goodbye Girl.
• Awesome Music: The communication music has forever been associated with films about aliens. Also, the score is done by John Motherfucking Williams. Case closed.
  • For reference, the communication music is known as "Signals."
  • The extended soundtrack album has the full track, which had to be edited down somewhat for the film. One can clearly hear the conversation going on between the mothership and the humans. First it begins with basic lessons, with the mothership teaching the humans, sometimes correcting, and sometimes getting frustrated. Then the human side starts to get the basics, and the music turns into a game of Follow The Leader. It gets faster and more complex, until you can all but hear the mothership shout, "Yes! I think you've got it!" Both sides go nuts, chattering excitedly. Then the mothership gives a low note to quiet it down. Okay, lesson's over, let's calm down and get back in our seats, kids. John Williams is bloody brilliant.
  • Listen carefully for musical Shout Outs to Jaws (when the mothership is communicating with the Devils Tower base) and Pinocchio (when Roy is being led into the ship).
    • The Special Edition ends with a beautiful instrumental rendition of "When You Wish Upon A Star", which gets quieter and quieter, and at the end segues into a choir singing the five notes. One suspects John Williams wanted to sing the audience to sleep, and he did a good job of it.
  • The "voice" of the mothership was done by Jim Self, a legendary tuba player in his own right. Spielberg used him because the skill and difficulty of playing the tuba gave the mothership a "human" characteristic.
  • In fact, the film was edited after the music was scored — in other words, the music informed the editing, instead of the usual.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: The film can be interpreted as a metaphor for a spiritual awakening and journey: An ordinary man (Roy Neary) has an experience with a higher power (encounters UFOs one night on the highway) that completely changes his life (becomes obsessed with UFOs to the detriment of his family and social life) and is subsequently compelled by this higher power (through a mentally implanted image) to make a pilgrimage to a predetermined location (travels to Devil's Tower, Wyoming) where he communes with the higher power (takes part in First Contact with the aliens) and is ascended into the heavens (departs with the aliens after being chosen to join them). Roy getting sunburned by the UFOs during his initial encounter marks his symbolic baptism from normal everyman to alien contactee.
  • That is just exactly how many New Age devotees perceived it at the time, although they recognized Spielberg may not have deliberately planned it this way. In fact, the "New Age Movement" as we know it, with the Channeling and Starseed and so on, although existing in one form or another since the 1950s, was deeply influenced by this picture.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Six years after Close Encounters was released, Colorado suffered a real toxic-gas spill following a train crash that forced an emergency evacuation, much like the cover story that was used in the film to justify evacuating the Devil's Tower area.
  • An example for Steven Spielberg himself: he mentioned on an interview in 2005 that the fact Roy abandons his family to be taken by the aliens at the end isn't something he would have added to the script, if he'd had made the film nowadays, now that he is a father himself.
  • During the meeting where the journalists are talking about the lack of photographic evidence one individual mentions they’ve never seen a photograph of a plane actually crashing. Post 9/11 this is a very chilling comment.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The humans who enter the mothership at the end are dressed in red jumpsuits and sunglasses, which in hindsight look like cheap versions of the aliens' outfits from the V1983 miniseries (in which the aliens did not turn out to be cuddly, friendly greys).
  • That little ball of red light that was always lagging behind the other alien craft, but is much too small to be another craft with a pilot inside flying it? Now we all know what that was all along; it was an alien drone that was being remote piloted by the other craft as a "rear lookout" or "rear guard" for the group.
    • Back in them days, sonny, we called that thar gizmo a "probe", but yeah, what you said is what fans assumed it to be at the time.
  • Six years after the release of the film, Melinda Dillon starred in the 1983 film A Christmas Story, which is set in Indiana.
• Memetic Mutation: Those. Five. Tones.
• Narm: The scene where Lacombe's research team finally communicates with the mothership can come off as fairly silly once you realize that the mothership's communication tones are just angry tuba noises.
• Once Original, Now Overdone: The film has defined near any "alien encounter" stories from The X-Files to Independence Day. As a result a lot of the mood and imagery has been emulated to death, and it's harder to recognize how revolutionary the film was.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Lance Henriksen is among the personnel gathered on Devil's Tower.
  • Carl Weathers turns up as a soldier who Roy tries to talk his way past at the train station.
• Signature Scene: The encounter at Devil's Tower is the movie's best known scene.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • While the spaceship was magnificent, the aliens themselves weren't as impressive, even for their time. The long-limbed alien was a rather crude marionette puppet (though the animatronic by Carlo Rambaldi doesn't look much better), the rest were clearly children/little people in rubber suits. Additionally, the musical notes sounded from the spacecraft were obviously tubas and other wind instruments.
• Strawman Has a Point: Roy Neary, the protagonist, makes his dreams come true when he meets the aliens and leaves on their ship. All is great and uplifting and wonderful... except the guy has a wife and four kids, who are dependent on him. His wife is presented as being vindictive, but this does not change the facts: chasing his dream, Neary got himself fired from his job, which was the main source of income for his whole family, and now leaves them altogether for a journey across space he dreamed of. His wife is absolutely right when she describes Roy as an overgrown kid without any sense of responsibility. Interestingly enough, the director himself noted later that now, being married and with children, he would not endorse Neary's actions.
• Unintentional Period Piece: In many, many ways:
  • Old cars and '70s fashion everywhere.
  • Technology Marches On. To cite just one example, the scene with the giant globe being obtained in order to work out the map coordinates would make no sense in the era of Google Maps. On a more meta note, Spielberg himself says that UFO phenomena was more believable in the '70s, before camcorders were invented in the '80s and sightings actually went down.
  • A middle-aged man (played by Roberts Blossom, age 53 at the time) mentioning that he saw Bigfoot in 1951 and 30s-ish Roy giving 1944 as his birth year.
  • Major Benchley says, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is a flying saucer. It's made of pewter, made in Japan, and thrown across the lawn by one of my children." This carries the implication of Japan being a source of cheap goods, which it was back then.
  • Howard K. Smith's Newscaster Cameo places the story no later than 1979, meaning the film was already dated when the special edition came out in 1980. (Although this one is more YMMV as Smith later played himself as an active newscaster in V1983, set in the mid-1980s.)
  • The real Cotopaxi was found in 2020.^note Well, technically it was found in 1985, but it wasn't positively identified as the Cotopaxi until 2020. Allegedly lost in The Bermuda Triangle, it turns out the wreck was off the coast of Florida the whole time. Ah, well.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • At the end of the film it's implied that all of this was in order to make First Contact with the Human race, that the aliens are benevolent and want to be friends. Which is all well and good except they very explicitly have kidnapped people over the course of the last century. We don't speak to these people after they are returned except for Barry, who is a very young child and was only gone for perhaps a few months. These people are years out of time, their family and friends have moved on or died without them, never having known what happened to them. They haven't visibly aged, so they may not even know how long they were gone and are in for a nasty shock when they attempt to go home. We don't even know what was done to them while on the alien craft and it's possible Roy and the other astronauts are in danger.
  • Roy is likable, but the fact that he put his obsession with the aliens ahead of being a good father to his children makes him unsympathetic to many viewers (and these days, even writer-director Spielberg).
• Values Dissonance: New Age faith in alien intelligence as a benevolent Higher Power, and in the sterile void of space as Heaven, doesn't resonate much any more (especially not after Alien), to say nothing of the divisiveness that comes down these days on a parent who abandons his family to pursue some other goal.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The spaceships are still pretty damn impressive.

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