Close Encounters of the Third Kind
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- This article is about the film; for the classification, see Close encounter.
Close Encounters was perhaps the most important science fiction movie up to that point to introduce benign or even kind aliens, a sharp departure from the 'evil monster' style of most earlier films. It popularised a number of motifs, most of which were drawn from earlier, purportedly genuine UFO encounters: alien abduction, small and thin aliens ("greys"), and UFOs covered in lights rather than the disc shapes more popular in the 1950s and 1960s, and so on. The moral contradiction between the aliens' "benevolence" and the forced abductions they conduct is left unexplored.
The movie has been revised numerous times, notably for a 132-minute "special edition" reissue in 1980 and again for a 137-minute "collector's edition" in 1988. The Special Edition features several new character development scenes, the discovery of a lost ship, the Cotopaxi, in the Gobi Desert, and a view of the inside of the mothership. The interior of the mothership is deleted from the Collector's Edition (Spielberg added this scene as a concession to be allowed to make the Special Edition. He decided it was a mistake and removed it in the later edition).
Plot Overview
The movie plot has three basic threads:
- A group of scientific researchers including Lacombe (Truffaut) and Laughlin (Balaban) investigate UFO reports worldwide, and discover a lost squadron of World War II aircraft (see Flight 19) in a Mexican desert.
- Indiana electrical lineman Roy Neary (Dreyfuss) experiences a close encounter of the second kind (a sighting that leaves physical evidence) and thereafter becomes obsessed with UFOs, to the great dismay of his family. He begins making endless models of a distinctive mountain or hill - a place he has never actually seen, and with which he is unfamiliar. At one point, he and his wife attend a meeting featuring both patronizing and skeptical government officials, and an archetypal crackpot ("I saw Bigfoot once!")
- Jillian Guiler (Dillon) witnesses the UFOs as well, then loses her son Barry (Guffey) to aliens who come to her home. It turns out that she has also been obsessed with the mental picture of a unique-looking mountain.
Neary and Guiler persist, and eventually see dozens of spacecraft appear, culminating with appearances from extraterrestrials, and the return of people who'd been abducted, including Guiler's young son Barry. At the end of the film, the aliens take Neary on board their ship and take off for the stars.
Trivia
- Spielberg was given an unprecedented budget of US $20M (1977). However, the film lacked the merchandising and sequel potential of Star Wars, hence the drive to extract extra earnings by releasing 'Special Editions'.
- When the original director of Jaws 2 was fired, Spielberg considered taking over. However, his contractual obligations to Close Encounters of the Third Kind meant that production on the sequel would have been delayed by an expensive year.
- The five tones that the space ship plays back and forth with the humans have shown up in later movies and TV shows, notably as a code entered on a pushbutton keypad in Moonraker of the James Bond series and in the Power Glove sequence of The Wizard. The five notes were also rearranged for the theme to Jurassic Park, also composed by John Williams.
- The motif woven through the film is re - mi - do - do (octave lower) - sol. At the climactic scene, François Truffaut and the alien use Kodály Hand Signs to express this motif. The alien smiles after doing so; Spielberg was slightly surprised and pleased that the prop could muster the facial gesture.
- Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, a UFO researcher who coined the term "close encounter," was a consultant for the film, makes a cameo appearance as a scientist smoking a pipe near the end of the picture.
- Dr. Jacques Vallee served as a model for the character of the French scientist Lacombe played by François Truffaut. Vallee met Hynek while studying for his Ph.D. at Northwestern University.
- Spielberg initially wanted the mothership to be very dark, but later on decided to make it extremely bright. A model of the mothership used during filming is on display at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Northern Virginia; the model includes a number of easter egg hidden objects integrated in and around the ship's antennas, domes and other structures. Examples include a 1930s automobile, a cemetery, a VW Bus and a small model of R2-D2.
- During an interview years later, Richard Dreyfuss was asked whether there would ever be a sequel to Close Encounters. He responded that, "The sequel to Close Encounters was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial."
- Spielberg would return to the "evil alien" with his 2005 version of War of the Worlds.
- To those familiar with the filming site, there is some geographic license taken in the famous scene in which Richard Dreyfuss' character Roy Neary is on his way to investigate the blackout. He is on Cornbread Rd. and he stops on a railroad crossing, and becomes enveloped in light from the UFO. Cornbread Rd exists, the railroad crossing, however, does not. Cornbread Rd. runs mostly parallel to the CSX Transportation line that comes close, but never crosses.
- The synthesizer used to communicate with the aliens at the end of the film is an ARP 2500 modular system. Phil Dodds, a tech from ARP Instruments Inc., is the man playing the keyboard.
- Melinda Dillon takes some photos of Dreyfuss's departure with the aliens using a Rollei 35 B compact camera.
- Steve McQueen, Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson and James Caan where all considered for the main role (McQueen was a recluse at the time, Hackman passed for unknown reasons, Nicholson was deemed too old and Caan's price tag was too high).
- French House band Daft Punk memorably opened their 2006 U.S. performace, their first in 8 years, at Coachella Music & Arts Festival with the theme music from the movie.
- The coordinates for the Devils's Tower in Wyoming as given in the movie are, unfortunately, incorrect. While the longitude is correct (104 deg, 44 min, 30 sec), the latitude is 04 degrees south of where the Devils' Tower National Monument is located (44 deg 36 min 10 sec).
See also
- The Day the Earth Stood Still, an early classic science fiction movie with benevolent aliens.
- [Serpo.org, The Zeta Reticuli Exchange Program] is a conspiracy theory website that purports that the US Government has been secretly involved with an extraterrestrial civilization since 1965 and has been covering it up. Among other "activities", it claims that personnel exchanges like the one seen in the film have been occurring on a regular basis. See Serpo for more.
External links
- [A full descriptive review at Filmsite]
- [Roger Ebert's review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind]
- [James Berardinelli's review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind]
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