#64 / Unlisted
Winner of 1 Academy Award.
Electrician Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) becomes obsessed with UFO's after an extra-terrestrial encounter during a power outage. He pursues them to Devil's Tower, Wyoming, after receiving a telepathic vision.
Sarah: I find aliens both fascinating and terrifying. (With the exception of E.T... I find him adorable.) CLOSE ENCOUNTERS gives me the feeling you might get when looking at a big fish that has been pulled from the bottom of the ocean. It captures both awe and fear. This is perfectly demonstrated when the little boy has an encounter. We can't see what he is looking at. We just get his reaction. First he looks terrified, and then he giggles and smiles. Brilliant!
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS also has an amazing use of sound - from the way Roy communicates with the aliens through melody to the loud all-encompassing noise that we hear when he first encounters them. It even won a special achievement award from the Academy in sound editing. So if you get this chance to see this movie in a place with the proper speakers, do it! I saw it at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and it was amazing to watch it under the stars and hear the film the way Spielberg wanted you to hear it. I think if I had seen it on a small screen first I would have missed the sense of wonder.
Eddie: I love this movie, because it's not really about aliens, in the same way that JAWS isn't really about a shark. Maybe it's Dreyfuss's performance. Maybe it's Spielberg's direction. But CLOSE ENCOUNTERS surpasses your ordinary sci-fi flick, becoming, instead, a movie about finding your place in the world. As a youngish dude, I can identify with that. The aliens don't have all the answers, but neither does Roy's boring life. Sure, it sucks that he completely abandons them (and part of me wishes there was a spin-off movie about what they did after their dad goes crazy and disappears), but Roy's got to find his own happiness. And he does, eventually, by teaming up with some space-traveling aliens.
Why You Should See It: The scene in his truck where Roy first encounters the aliens and gravity goes haywire. Dreyfuss plays that scene perfectly.
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