Michael: Maybe it was an iguana.
Elliot: It was NO iguana.
Michael: You know how they say there are alligators in the sewers?
Gertie: Alligators in the sewers.
Mary: All we're trying to say is, maybe you just probably imagined it.
Elliot: I couldn't have imagined it!
Michael: Maybe it was a pervert or a deformed kid or something.
Gertie: A deformed kid.
Michael: Maybe an elf or a leprechaun?
Elliot: It was nothing like that, penis-breath!
Back when E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial was originally released, I was smack in the middle of what the film's target demographic must have been. For some reason, though, my family never really embraced E.T. quite as feverishly as the rest of the country did. In our house, the top shelf of family cinema was reserved for pictures like Gremlins, Star Wars, Poltergeist, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Queen Mother of watch-it-until-you-know-it-by-heart films, A Christmas Story (and, when my parents were gone, Body Heat).
Until the screening of the spiffy new version of E.T., it had literally been 20 years since I had seen it. If asked to recount the moments I could remember, the sorry highlight reel would probably be shorter than a TV commercial. In fact, the one thing I distinctly recall from the 1982 viewing is being kind of troubled by the tract housing depicted in the film, imagining myself living in a similar neighborhood, getting off the school bus and not being able to tell which house was mine.
Still, I was anxious to see the new version, if only to answer these questions: Would the film hold up after two decades or would it seem derivative and overly schmaltzy? Would years and years of cinematic desensitization have numbed me to the point where E.T. would seem no more emotionally warming than an episode of Reba, or would the magic of Steven Spielberg transcend time and reveal itself as one of the best films ever made?
For the most part, the film does hold up pretty well, though it is quite derivative (particularly of The Day the Earth Stood Still) and pretty damn schmaltzy, but not in a way that makes you feel like too much of a tool. Save a new scene here and a re-done special effect there, E.T. is still the same old film about a young boy named Elliott (Henry Thomas) who finds a toddler-sized alien with a translucent chest, extendo-neck and voice like an Italian grandmother with a three-pack-a-day habit.
The alien, or "E.T.," was accidentally left behind by his brethren on a scientific-type mission to Earth and holes up with Elliott and his family until he can figure out how to build an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator using typical household objects in order to relay a distress call (or "phone home") to his planet. E.T. does this after seeing a similar device in a Buck Rogers comic strip, which is actually more of an explanation than we ever got from MacGyver or those guys from The A-Team (but this concept would never work now, because E.T. could phone home much quicker, what with DSL and all). And the little guy learns the language faster than any other newcomer to this country ever has (yeah, I'm talking to you, Mr. Schwarzenegger).
The re-release of E.T. offers plenty of chances to see exciting things, like a very young Drew Barrymore (who was probably already half-crocked when E.T. delivers his parting advice to "be good") and brief appearances by miniature versions of C. Thomas Howell and Erika Eleniak. There's a sexy new bathtub scene, but no Harrison Ford, who played Elliott's school principal but has yet to make it into any cut of this film (his then-wife, Melissa Mathison, wrote the screenplay). You can still enjoy rabble-rousing phrases like "douche bag" and "penis breath," but you won't hear the word "terrorist" or see the government goons wielding guns because Spielberg's testicles ascended somewhere into his chest cavity after having and adopting kids of his own. There are a lot of cool point-of-view shots and, thankfully, no sappy epilogue that left things open for a sequel.
As enjoyable as the film is, it's rather bothersome that E.T.'s trailer declares itself to be Spielberg's "masterpiece," obviously forgetting those two underseen little gems that won his Best Director Oscars (Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan). Personally, I wouldn't even rate E.T. among Spielberg's best sci-fi films, placing it well after A.I. and Close Encounters. Though it only took in a paltry $11.9 million during its opening weekend (that might be good for a 5th place finish in this century), the film eventually made about $400 million in the U.S. alone. It was nominated for nine Oscars and won five, mostly in technical categories, including John Williams' score which features the most annoying swell in the history of modern cinema. Most notably -and shockingly - it somehow bested Das Boot in both the Best Sound and Best Sound Effects Editing categories.
By : Jon Popick
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 0
E.T. is back. Well, no, he's not really back. He's here again for the first time. And he's just as wonderful this time around.
Steven Spielberg is a class act. It's hard to imagine many other filmmakers in this profit-maddened day and age resisting the megabucks that would roll in from an "E.T. 2". (The lovable little alien misses Elliott, and returns to earth. Elliott, now thirty, is a failed TV writer struggling to kick his methadone habit. A touch from the glowing finger of the extra-terrestrial puts him back in the pink, and together the two pals set out on a wacky cross-galaxy road trip in their beat-up UFO....)
No, no! It's still 1982, and E.T. is just the way you remember him. This is very nearly a perfect movie, assuming you still have some trace of childhood left in you. An Inner Child will do. Like J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, a story which Spielberg uses here as a conscious point of reference, "E.T." is a paean to childhood, to the fleeting magic years of imaginary friends who fade away like Puff the Magic Dragon under the withering onslaught of adolescence.
The grownups in this movie are always seen from the low angle of a child's perspective. They're faceless, threatening creatures, and what they threaten is the fantasy world of childhood itself. For most of the movie the only adult face we see is the mother (Dee Wallace-Stone), who is, after all, the main link between the child's world and the grimmer world of grownups. Later on we get a scientist (Peter Coyote), whose credentials for admission are that his boyhood dreams are still alive - "I've been wishing for this since I was ten years old," he tells Elliott (Henry Thomas). And then, in that terrible moment when E.T.'s vital signs stop under the detached probing of the team of government scientists, the spell is broken, the masks come off, the camera swings up, and the bland, earthbound faces of the grownups emerge into commonplace. In this flawlessly-captured world of childhood, it is the grownups whore are the true aliens.
Spielberg has said that "E.T." is his most personal movie. It springs from the longings and insecurities he felt as a child over the break-up of his parents, and that situation is mirrored in Elliott's life, with the father decamped and off "in Mexico with Sally." In that unsettled world, a boy needs a special friend, and who better than a wizened little extraterrestrial who combines the irrepressible cuteness of a puppy with the wisdom and can-do capability of an absent father? During the shooting of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" Spielberg spent countless hours pouring out his heart to star Harrison Ford's girlfriend, screenwriter Melissa Mathison, who fashioned "E.T.'s" wonderful screenplay.
The movie in its twentieth anniversary re-release has the added resonance of nostalgia. The world has changed since then, the kids have all grown up. Henry Thomas was recently in "All the Pretty Horses", and has five movies awaiting release this year. Drew Barrymore has been through rehab and two marriages that lasted a total of seven months, and this year will fill the big screen as "Barbarella". We know a bit about their futures, but little Gertie is still the same self-possessed, adorable moppet who crows "I taught him how to talk!", and Elliott is still the same unswervingly loyal kid.
Much has been made of the changes Spielberg has wrought in refurbishing his classic for re-issue. In the climactic chase scene he has digitally replaced the guns in the agents' hands with walkie-talkies, which would seem like silliness if you noticed it, but I got so caught up in the moment that it went right by me. More noticeable (and sillier) is the change in an off-screen line when Mom criticizes her older son's Halloween costume, replacing the word "terrorist" with "hippie." The kid is dressed as a bum with a cleaver in his skull, and looks nothing like a hippie, and the mom, a veteran of the flower child generation, ought to know the difference. There are digital tweaks in E.T.'s expressions and movements that are all to the good, and a funny scene in a bathtub restored from excised footage.
And - this may have always been there, but you notice it now - hanging in the night sky above the shed where E.T. takes shelter, there is a crescent moon which looks awfully like the Dreamworks logo.
By : Jonathan F. Richards
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