1977 science fiction, dir. Steven Spielberg, Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda
Dillon: IMDb /
allmovie. The aliens are
coming! The aliens are coming!
I saw this on first run in the cinema, and hadn't thought much
about it since until it came up in our consideration of influential
films. What struck me most – after those two utterly gorgeous opening
sequences, an expedition finding the perfectly-preserved planes of
Flight 19 in the Mexican desert, and an object sighting from some
airliners where neither pilot wants to file a report, shown entirely
from the perspective of the air traffic controllers – is that, in his
next film after Jaws, we're diving straight into what would become a
Spielberg cliché, his fascination with childhood and children as the
most important people in a film.
I find small children boring, and I find most child actors
unconvincing, and the degree to which we dwell on them was one of my
problems with the film.
At the same time I see Roy Neary as the prototype of the manchild
hero: even before his Encounter, he's playing with his train set
rather than helping his kid with homework, and he's clearly doing as
little parenting as possible while leaving all the hard work to his
wife. I couldn't help noticing that after he's had his scary
experience he barely answers a thing that his wife or children say to
him: it's all about me me me what I want. Our hero, ladies and
gentlemen; some reviewers found his wife Ronnie, played by Teri Garr,
"shrill", but I found myself entirely in favour of her taking the
children and going elsewhere, as she finally does when she's exhausted
all possible ways of getting him to engage with any of them as people
rather than obstructions on his holy mission. Who's to say he won't
escalate from breaking up the house to a more personal level of
violence?
(The same year, Teri Garr played another wife-and-mother whose husband
had a sudden life-changing obsession, in the George Burns vehicle Oh,
God!. Something in the air, I suppose.)
But of course it's a cheat. In the real world, we don't see the
uncanny bright light and get the sunburn; we hear some unconvincing
guy saying "no, really, this happened to me, and when I talk about
the probing I'm not in any way sublimating my fear of and attraction
to homosexuality". But because the film has shown us all that proof,
we're forced to be on the side of believing, within the film's world,
that the aliens are real; and therefore that the people who don't
believe are simply wrong or bad, mere obstacles to be brushed aside.
Filmically it's great. The five-tone sequence (which means, in the
end, nothing more than "I am able to repeat the thing I've heard").
The effects, done by Douglas Trumbull after he'd turned down the
chance to head up Industrial Light and Magic, of the various small
craft and the mother ship. The way all Roy's sequences are indoors or
in the dark, until Ronnie leaves him, and suddenly it's daylight. The
way we see the "dead" animals as "proof" of the nerve gas leak, and
the way that's explained in a line that defuses this tension but also
advances the plot.
But I don't ever come to like these people, and they don't do a
whole lot. One lot follow the voices in their heads and arrive just in
time to take advantage of all the hard work the other lot were doing
off-camera. The man gets to go and see the universe; the woman gets
her kid back. And it's over two hours to get there.
It was, of course, hugely successful, and while not directly imitated
I think it's been in the back of people's minds any time they make a
film about aliens coming to Earth.
Once more if you want more of my witterings you should listen to
Ribbon of Memes.
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