Movie night: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Providing what I've been missing in sci-fi

My husband and I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind last night—rewatched, technically, but neither of us had seen it in decades, and our memory of it was quite patchy. (Devils Tower in mashed potatoes? And a mothership with lights? And those five notes? And...couldn't remember much else.)

Richard Dreyfuss sculpts his potatoes

Verdict: We loved it! These many decades later, after countless sci-fi shows and films in which every scientific thing is explained in meticulous jargony detail in a super-tense high-security-briefing scene, and the aliens are almost always apocalyptically menacing, Close Encounters feels like a beautiful, dreamy, eerie art film.

A lot is left only hinted at, even completely unexplained, and actually I loved that. It infuses the film with a sense of wonder, akin to discovering that the fae are real (but still scientifically inexplicable). I also liked that the aliens—along with the government agencies—are essentially nice. No one's out to kill anyone. There's a big cover-up going on, and uncanniness and frustration abound, but nobody is evil.

And damn, I think I miss that in sci-fi, which lately is almost always about how Aliens And/Or The Government Are Trying To Kill You. A premise of which I am tired, apparently.

Thank you for your gentleness and for your willingness to include beauty and wonder in an alien story, Steven Spielberg.

The beauty and awe of the mothership over Devils Tower