saraccan
I was really into it until they started becoming super friendly with the aliens. Thats one thing I can never understand in these movies. The build up and suspense is almost always good then they just have to go and show these funny little alien people walking around and ruin everything. However this movie from 1977 just goes to show how there aren't that many good sci-fi movies anymore even though the tech is obviously here. Makes me sad. Its an alien movie about a guy and also some other people who are having weird visions to visit some weird mountain after their encounters.
muons
The movie starts in a chaotic fashion and disengages the audience right at the get-go. The awfully slow combinations of disconnected scenes include noise, dust, flashlights in darkness, yelling and screaming at the breakfast table, erratic behavior of a father of two, dispassionate government workers and so on. The movie is not even sure about its own genre. What starts like an UFO encounter which was trendy of its time takes a weird turn into a cheesy horror flick with all the known cliches like an eerie soundtrack, screws coming off, doors slamming all by themselves and then goes back to its nonexistent plot. Only in the last half an hour or so, Spielberg makes some futile efforts to tie the loose ends together in a weak plot but that appears too little, too late. I can't believe he doesn't even force his imagination a bit later in ET where he recycles the same alien characters of this movie. I saw the movie about 40 years after its release and felt like it aged 10000 years.
flamesreborn
I hate to say it, I swear I'm not a contrarian, but Close Encounters is a mess. The film reeks of a young, overconfident Spielberg coming off the success of his masterpiece, Jaws, and directing his own screenplay, but afraid of editing himself down because he was in love with his script. And a solid idea his film's plot is, filled with interesting characters, an eerie yet hopeful take on alien life.
Unfortunately, his film gets bogged down in the final third. Richard Dreyfuss is charming as ever, and his humor hits regularly, Melinda Dillon is also hugely watchable, and the soundtrack is incredible, one of the all-time greats, but a lot of what is setup is never paid off. Dreyfuss' family life is heavily focused on in the first two acts, but the film seems selfish, with Dreyfuss and the film abandoning his children and wife for a fantastical ending that just doesn't want to end, and plays the audience a little too long. It at times feels like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in how it's so in love with it's giant ships and epic scale, but the humans get waysided by the spectacle. The ending is awe-inspiring, in fits, but overstays it's welcome, with a cynical character decision in the end, that left me angry and dumbfounded.
This film is a complete mess, but it's a beautifully directed one, with an incredible score, and some great performances, and it should be appreciated for those reasons alone. It's worth a watch, and maybe it will connect with you more, but for me it seemed like 1977 Spielberg needed to be humbled, which seemed to have happened with his film 1941, with bombed, and brought him back down to Earth.
