Release Year: 1977 Rating: PG Duration: 132 minutes Other Title: Watch the Skies, CE3K Director: Steven Spielberg Producer: Julia Phillips, Michael Phillips
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND is Steven Spielberg's extraordinary film about a man named Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) who becomes obsessed with meeting extraterrestrials after encountering a UFO on an abandoned road one night. Against the wishes of his wife (Teri Garr) and children, Neary, along with another witness to the sighting (Melinda Dillon), travels to a mysterious mountain where the government has built a landing strip hoping to attract the aliens. Director François Truffaut costars as Claude Lacombe, one of the organizers of the project. Spielberg hoped to follow up the huge success of JAWS with a low-budget film that would be an easy shoot, but, thanks in part to the complicated special effects, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS quickly snowballed into being an expensive endeavor but a commercial and artistic success. No one who has seen the film has ever looked at a plate of mashed potatotes the same way again.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind Reviews (5 reviews)
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By 1977 director Steven Spielberg had already established himself as a world class filmmaker with 'Jaws' in 1975 and his big screen debut in 1974 entitled 'The Sugarland Express'. While the former was obviously the more popular, many of Spielberg's fans also recall an ingenious television movie he did in 1971 entitled 'Duel' which is a cult favourite among many film fanatics, myself included. Born in Cincinnatit, Ohio in 1947, Spielberg achieved greatness in the art of filmmaking before he was thirty years old. Undoubtedly the greatest creative mind working in film in the last twenty five years, Spielberg's films invoke debate everytime someone asks "What is his masterpiece?" Is it 'E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial' (1982)? This was a gentle and loving film about the child in all of us and a moving, simplistic fantasy with religious implications done in a most tolerable fashion. Is it 'Schindler's List' (1993)? This harrowing story about the holocaust and one of the most original looking and important film of the twentieth century was the film that earned Spielberg recognition among his peers with seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director for Spielberg himself. I suspect that if you ask Spielberg what the crowning achievement in his career is, he will vote for this one and rightfully so.
