Re-encountering a UFO movie classic
My wife and I were relaxing at a cottage late the other weekend when a bright white flash of light outside the window startled us. There should have been no light, apart from the faint glow of a crescent moon.
Our summer rental, on the edge of a cliff overlooking beautiful Lake Kamaniskeg in the Madawaska Valley, is shrouded by pine trees. It gets very dark there.
We figured at first the flash might be the headlights of a car or boat, but we weren’t near the highway and the water was calm. A light from the sky seemed to be the only other option, but there was no sound of an aircraft or thunder.
Then I thought of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the UFO movie from 40 years ago that’s getting an anniversary re-release in theatres this weekend. The alien visitors of the film swoop down upon Earth with their brightly lit spacecraft, more out of curiosity than malice, although their habit of abducting humans makes them far from completely harmless. Could the flash my wife and I saw have been little green men looking for cottage land — or worse, cottagers?
It occurs to me that Close Encounters has aged well, better than anyone might have expected when the film first came out. Critics of the day praised its Spielbergian blend of science fiction and “When You Wish Upon a Star” storybook enchantment, while at the same time recognizing it was hardly a novel concept. Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it “the best — the most elaborate — 1950s science fiction movie ever made.”
The film also pays serious homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, another movie about curious aliens. Close Encounters opens with an overture reminiscent of the otherworldly symphonies of Gyorgy Ligeti heard in 2001and it concludes with a scene that recalls the eyepopping Star Gate sequence at the end of Kubrick’s opus.
What Close Encounters lacked in originality, it made up in influence. You can see its impact on the many UFO films that followed it in the past four decades, especially the more thoughtful ones like Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-terrestrial, Robert Zemeckis’s Contact and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. These films zero in on the idea of achieving real communication and understanding with beings who are not of this Earth.
In Close Encounters, Spielberg also notes the difficulties that earthlings have in communicating with each other.
He cast fellow filmmaker François Truffaut, whom he admired, as a French scientist studying the UFOs, but who required the translations provided by a bilingual American cartographer played by Bob Balaban.
Most of Close Encounters plays at an intuitive level. We don’t know why the aliens are visiting, or why they seem to randomly abduct everyone from Second World War fighter pilots to a toddler in the farming country of modern-day Muncie, Ind. We can’t intuit intent when the UFOs both alarm and fascinate air traffic controllers, in one of the film’s most masterfully staged scenes.
Human reactions to the UFOs are equally baffling. Some people are mesmerized by the five-tone mu- sical sound the spacecraft make. Others, like Indiana electrical worker Roy (Richard Dreyfuss) and Jillian (Melinda Dillon), the single mom of the abducted toddler, become obsessed by an image of a flat-topped mountain, the meaning of which is revealed later in the film.
The aliens in Close Encounters are mystifying, but it’s not like they’re trying to hide from us or fool us. Their behaviour is unlike that of the humans in the film. Government and military officials seek to deny the existence of the UFOs and they concoct a cover story — a nerve-gas leak — to keep curious humans away from the aliens’ landing site.
Similar cover-ups are at work in 2001, E.T., Arrival and innumerable other movies about contact between earthlings and extraterrestrials. “Fake news” has been around longer than Donald Trump.
In sci-fi movies, it’s usually as-
In sci-fi movies, it’s usually assumed that humans don’t have the brains or bravery to cope with the thought of alien life. But Close Encounters actually suggests we could handle it
sumed that humans don’t have the brains or bravery to cope with the thought of intelligent life beyond the stars.
As Jack Nicholson said in another movie, A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth.” (Nicholson, incidentally, turned down the role of Roy in Close Encounters because of another commitment.)
But Close Encounters actually suggests we could handle the idea of E.T. coming for a visit. The most magical thing about the movie is the sight of earthlings standing in awe and experiencing joy at the sight of their otherworldly visitors.
It’s this sense of wonder that sets the movie apart from most of its imitators and makes revisiting it a real pleasure, 40 years on.
Back at the cottage, our pal Dennis surmises that the bright light we saw was a phenomenon called “heat lightning,” an atmospheric event that occurs far enough away that you can see it but not hear it.
This makes sense, but I prefer to think that what my wife and I saw was the quick flash of a curious Close Encounters visitor, checking out the Madawaska scenery. Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.