Steven Spielberg directs Richard Dreyfuss, Francois Truffaut and Melinda Dillon in this sci-fi epic about people making regular contact with aliens and the government attempts to contain that. 

As a massive Spielberg fan, I do suffer from the fact that some of his most highly regarded blockbusters do less for me than their towering reputations suggest. I feel he has made only one truly great alien themed blockbuster and it is controversially neither E.T. nor this. Both his hippy dippier entertainments are too bogged down in their domestic perspective wonder, plodding running times and lightshows at tremendous scale finales. Give me the Cruiser dashing through the dust of death ray obliterated humans any day of the week. CEot3K bored me as a kid, then improved for me as an adult. The visitation sequences are brilliantly tense and sustained if too sparse. The obsessive, home wrecking mania of those effected by their experiences is strongly evoked by Spielberg’s patient direction and Dreyfuss and Dillon’s low key, convincing acting. And the conspiracy itself is imbued with that neat visual shorthand storytelling you expect from the wunderkind auteur. But it never coalesces into anything that satisfies me. On this big screen viewing, I found myself drifting away, noticing how horribly ropey the alien effect work was (and I can normally forgive all manner of practical FX sins as they have been practically attempted), remembering how much more captivating and awe inspiring later, similar films like Starman or Contact are. I keep wavering on Close Encounters, it is a movie I cannot get a fix on. This viewing left me cold, next time… who knows?

6