Reviews Film / Close Encounters Of The Third Kind

A decent attempt at realistic exploration, at the cost of engagement and narrative.

What I think this film was trying to do was explore what would really happen if aliens arrived, breaking down the idea of them being relatable and seeing how everyday people and the government would deal with them.

The film does a good job at building suspense. The aliens aren't seen until the end, and the ships themselves are heavily obscured until the third act. There are some great tense scenes where the aliens attempt to abduct a child, and the tone and similar plot often make this feel like a sister film to Poltergeist, another film Spielberg was on. I like the aliens' depiction as unknowable and morally ambiguous, and how they break the minds of people who brush with them. The exploration of how the government and the military try to deal with things and establish contact is also effective, though the global viewpoint feels deeply under-explored in the plot. I also like the musical communication.

The main issue is that the pacing and plot just don't click. The film often takes a slow pace that lingers too long on things. The opening was one of the dullest I've seen due to the length and almost nothing actually happening, and even some of the biggest spectacle scenes in the film felt overdrawn. I wasn't as impressed as the filmmakers clearly were. The narrative and characters are also messy. Roy, the protagonist, is driven mad by compulsions from the aliens, breaking his family apart. The story offers the chance to feel where his scared wife is coming from, but she's not a very loving partner and, even knowing she has a reason to be skeptical, her actions don't help him. Teri Garr deserved better. Fellow protagonist Jillian wants to protect her son, but her performance feels too disconnected and spacey most of the time for us to feel like she's really giving her all. I believe she loves him in some moments, but in others, I was begging her to just move faster and be fierce and angry while defending him. Making her more formidably proactive would have made the struggle more tense and her more appealing. They picked Melinda Dillon for A Christmas Story based on this film, which is odd. I think the latter film was the one that really let her talents shine, not this.

The third act introduces a third protagonist with zero impact and the protagonists take a back seat to the first contact, with little explained about why they were called to the site and no real sense of resolution by the film's end.

This film isn't a compelling story, but it does have interesting exploration of aliens.