Watched this on Blu-ray last night - would you believe for the first time! I watched the original theatrical version. Coming just two years after Spielberg's early blockbuster Jaws (1975) this helped to cement him as a major force in Hollywood. In many ways this film is as fresh and engaging as when it was first released. In other ways it's very much a product of its time when Cold War tensions ran high and UFO fever was contagious.
The story is gentle enough and moves towards its inevitable conclusion - at a snail's pace. The film could have benefitted from 30 minutes being cut from its 132 minute run time. Any film that deals with an encounter with aliens has to acknowledge the possibility of a bonkers plot and what better way to do it than to have a bonkers main character! Richard Dreyfuss (who also had a lead in Jaws) delivers a strong performance as Roy Neary - a lineman who happened to be in the right place at the right time!
Strange occurrences are investigated by the Frenchman Lacombe (François Truffaut) as missing planes and a ship reappear miles from where they went missing and crowds of people in remote areas of Northern India all share the same experience of an encounter with a five note tune coming from the sky. There is no explanation of why Lacombe has access to the world's leaders and America's military top brass but he is clearly the only one who links the odd sightings and reports from around the world.
Along with the tune and unexplained manifestation of sunburn-like symptoms on people who encounter the aliens is a drivenness on their part to draw and sculpt a mountain-like structure. They don't know what or where it is but at one point Neary even sculpts it out of mashed potato - a scene that has become famous in the annals of movie history. One of many comedic episodes in this drama.
Given that this film was made before the advent of digital special effects the UFO scenes are wonderful in their blurred and fuzzy kind of way. By being visually less well defined, the invitation is issued to the viewer for them to decide what they want to conclude they are seeing. Perhaps that's how UFO sightings are reported anyway? When the aliens do appear they are are so strongly back-lit that their details are hard to see - another clever bit of Spielberg choosing to invite the viewer's imagination to become active.
Having watched the film now for the first time, 37 years after it was made, it's hard to appreciate how much ground it broke as my senses have become desensitised by CGI and green screen film making. It's amazing how much evolution has taken place when you consider visual/CGI landmark films such as Tron, Toy Story, The Matrix, Avatar and Gravity to name but a few. It is however still possible to catch a glimpse of why this film remains so popular and is so important in the development of film-making. I'd like to give it more but because it was too long, it gets 7/10.
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