Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters Director’s Cut Is Free on YouTube

Steven Spielberg has made at least six films that could be called revolutionary. He has had misfires and failures, but his work has reshaped multiple genres and influenced filmmaking around the world.

His influence runs from the period action of Indiana Jones, inspired by old movie serials, to the war films that followed Saving Private Ryan. It can also be seen in monster movies made after 1975.

Spielberg deserves credit, too, for his influence on the alien conspiracy thriller. Released in 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind was his second big hit after Jaws. It may not have held the popular imagination as firmly as some of his later films, but its influence can be seen in the alien-abduction movies and television of the 1980s and 1990s.

Ahead of the film’s 50th anniversary, YouTube is streaming it for free with ads. The version available is the Spielberg-endorsed 1998 Director’s Cut, which reverses some changes made for the 1980 Special Edition.

I guess you’ve noticed something a little strange with Dad

As a child, I thought Close Encounters was the third film in a series. The title comes from J. Allen Hynek’s 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. Hynek was a scientific consultant on the film and makes a cameo as the man smoking a pipe at Devils Tower.

In his book, Hynek proposed a classification scale for UFO sightings. It ranged from strange lights in the sky to an encounter with a UFO accompanied by an “animated entity,” such as a human pilot or an alien. The latter three categories were called “close encounters.” The last, a “third kind” encounter, gave the film its title and describes what is now more commonly called “first contact.”

Close Encounters opens in 1977, when several lost aircraft suddenly reappear in the desert. As scientists try to understand what happened, people report UFO sightings around the world.

In Muncie, Indiana, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) is called out to deal with a local power outage. A passing UFO nearly hits him and burns half his face.

Roy becomes obsessed with UFOs, putting his relationship with his wife Ronnie (Teri Garr) and their children at risk. Without knowing why, he feels compelled to make models of a particular mountain from whatever is at hand, including dirt, clay and mashed potatoes. His obsession is about to intersect with a real conspiracy.

Some of the film can be difficult to watch. The audience knows Roy is onto something because his obsession connects with events elsewhere in the story, but Roy has no such reassurance. The second act follows his psychological disintegration as he struggles to understand what has happened to him.

At one point, Roy sits alone in his house, surrounded by news clippings and handmade models. The scene anticipates later conspiracy-board scenes in popular culture, from The X-Files to the famous Charlie Day meme from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Roy is also a prototype for a familiar character in Western fiction: the conspiracy-monger looking for one final “I told you so!”

That uneasy portrait may help explain why Close Encounters has faded somewhat from popular memory. Although it is science fiction, it lacks the spectacle and excitement of Spielberg’s later work in the genre. Five years later, he returned to the subject of alien conspiracies with E.T., which may have overshadowed the earlier film. Dreyfuss unraveling at the family dinner table is less iconic than the bicycle chase in E.T.

Nearly 50 years later, Close Encounters of the Third Kind remains an overlooked part of science fiction history. It is closer to a strange family drama than a thriller, but it is still worth seeing.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind’s Director’s Cut is currently streaming on YouTube.

Source: Polygon