Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)

So before watching this film I was fairly certain that I had seen it before as a youngster. I thought this because I knew the vague story and remembered key scenes within the film. However, as I was watching it recently I began to doubt that this was actually true. You see, for every scene that seemed familiar, there were about 10 that didn't. So I must suppose that either my memory works in mysterious ways, or that I had in fact seen the film represented in clip shows and magazine articles so much in my life I assumed I simply must have seen it. So yeah, this may have been the first time I have actually seen this film.

The story is simple, aliens are about, some people start to see them, the government denies it, there's a couple of abductions and then it all ends with a meeting by a mountain with the government officials and the alien folk. It's a Spielberg film so I was expecting something special. And in a way I got that. There are moments that are simply inspired. One example of this is the use of headlights, one scene when his car is stopped Richard Dreyfuss waves the car behind him on. Another set of headlights appear behind him later, and he again waves them on. But instead of simply going round him, these headlights rise vertically into the air. It's a very simply shot, but very clever and effective.

There are moments like this scattered throughout Close Encounters that show that Spielberg is simply a wonderful director (if not prone to sentimentalisation) who will hopefully be making films for years to come. However, I think this film is a tad too long, it wasn't that I found the ending drawn out or dull, it was just somewhere in the middle my attention began to die away. I may need to watch it again, I may need to be in a slightly different frame of mind, but this time, for some reason, I found myself distracted a little. I think perhaps that it was because we'd had all the character development, I understood what they all wanted and needed, and then they were still there... just there... hanging around.

The cast are superb, Cary Guffey in particularly showing pretty much every other child actor how it should be done, is superb. Francois Truffaut is a surprisingly good turn in acting (I've not really seen him do this before) and obviously Dreyfuss is great too. I think I would probably watch this film again, if only because it is a very cleverly made film, much like warhorse was, but whilst the sentimentality of warhorse puts me off watching it again, the lack of it here makes me want to go back and see what I missed.