Steven Spielberg has evolved as a filmmaker. Duh. I know, but it doesn't happen to all filmmakers. They might improve their technical craft, but often they don't mature as a storyteller, or in their preferred themes. Spielberg's evolution is easy to pinpoint. There's pre-family Spielberg and there's post-family Spielberg.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the pre-family Spielberg, and he's even said in interviews that there's no way he would've written
Close Encounters of the Third Kind if he had a wife and kids.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is ostensibly about aliens. Richard Dreyfuss is a normal family man who witnesses a UFO and suddenly becomes possessed, obsessed. By what, he's not so sure. He stays inside, creating sculptures that even he can't make sense of. Eventually he abandons his family, and follows whatever it is that's guiding him. He finds aliens.
Spielberg would never have a father abandon his family in a film these days.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind comes from Spielberg's issues with his own father, though aliens are something he's always been obsessed with. It's hard to get into the meat of the story without spoiling the end, so I won't.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a great film, atmospheric, bittersweet and mysterious. The music is great, Dreyfuss gives us one of his best performances and, thematic elements aside,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of the films that marked Spielberg as the next great director.
They don't make films like
Close Encounters of the Third Kind anymore. If Hollywood makes a film about aliens, it's going to be of the large-scale variety. There must be battles, the aliens must be evil, and humanity must be in peril. The closest anyone has come to the mystery of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind lately is
Signs by M. Night Shymalan, though the aliens in that film were evil.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is such a cool, wonderfully structured little film. I wish we could see more like it.
-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image Courtesy of Columbia)