Close Encounters of The Third Kind (1977)

Another movie constantly tipped as 'one of the greatest of all time' is Spielberg's follow up to . Close Encounters is an epic movie about an electrical worker who becomes a contactee. Of the third kind. As well as demonstrating the taut pacing and nail-biting action sequences that made Jaws such a hit, Close Encounters built further on the spaceships-as-reality concept - the sfx team led by Douglas Trumbull set the standard for subsequent sci-fi films with their eerie flashing lights - a far cry from the wobbling discs of the 1950s and 1960s.

Flashing lights feature extensively, showing Spielberg's essential understanding of cinema as light. Lights connote power, beauty, a higher truth, another world - the benign flipside of the lights in Poltergeist (1982, co-written & co-produced by Spielberg). Lights are what select the contactees - all of them display idiosyncratic burn marks after first seeing the space ships. Close Encounters is a pursuit story. Our everyman character, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), is compelled to pursue the flashing lights the instant he first encounters them (although he admits "I didn't ask to see them"), and he chases the illusion at the cost of his family life (his wife and kids are outta there as soon as dad starts playing with his mashed potato). Close Encounters deftly balances Roy's personal, spiritual quest with the strategies of the official investigation. What could have been a broad, impersonal film (on the scale of 2001) revolves instead around believable characters - Neary and Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon), whose three year old son becomes the first abductee. The special effects are dazzling, but what you remember about the movie is the look on Neary's face as he waves farewell to earth and goes onboard the spaceship.

Close Encounters is one of the few sci-fi films that position aliens as benevolent creatures (well, at least for Neary's sake we hope they are) who, despite their vastly superior technology, never once fire on human beings or threaten them in any way. Generically, aliens comfortably occupy the position of 'threat' within a movie's narrative structure: they are 'other', they appear as a homogenous group that no one is going to defend against stereotyping, they remain hidden and don't really come out of the shadows until the climactic battle. They don't speak a recognisable language. We can hate them for their otherness without feeling xenophobic. We can countenance the destruction of a whole species without ecological concerns getting in the way. Spielberg turns all that on its head - but cautiously. In Close Encounters the aliens are primarily represented by their ships, buzzing isolated homesteads and following remote mountain pathways. The ships are strong, magnificent, powerful, faster than police cars. They cause damage, but it appears inadvertent, the by-product of electromagnetic fields. Spielberg plays with the idea of the ships as threatening - this is an action movie after all, and billed as "from the director of Jaws". The first third of the film is indeed frightening - but this is to do with pacing, suggestion, lighting, and the curiously blank look on Barry's face. Toys rumble out of cupboards, larger objects slam across the room, a small child disappears into the dangerous darkness. It's scary because we don't know what's happening, and Spielberg re-employs a lot of these devices in his script for Poltergeist (1982). Spielberg plays with us during these early scenes - when Neary stops to look at his map we are tricked into thinking the lights in his rear-view mirror are just another road vehicle, until they rise upwards. Neary doesn't notice, the audience are screaming "Look behind you!". Classic cinema.

Close Encounters, although a masterwork in its own right, is in some ways just a sketchbook for ET, made three years later. Spielberg extends the idea of benevolent aliens, suggesting that a race of gardening gnomes might accidentally leave one of their number behind, to be found by children. The Christmas bauble spaceships return, plus the blinking, squashyheaded aliens who make toys switch on of their own accord, and even John Williams' score picks up similar themes. However, it is clearly a film aimed at a younger audience (though adults are known to sob at the end) and it lacks the enigma and tension of its predecessor. Both works should be viewed in tandem, for along with those damn Ewoks, they did change public thinking about "cuddly" aliens. John Carpenter's The Thing was released the same year as ET, by the same studio (Universal) and they buried it as totally out of tune with the zeitgeist. It took several years, and some sterling work by the likes of James Cameron (Aliens, 1986) before audiences were entirely happy with a blanket "nuke 'em" policy on xenomorphs.

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