I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind with twelve hundred other people, and somewhere in the final twenty minutes I realized the whole theater had stopped breathing at once. A film always plays differently in a full house — laughter spreads, gasps travel, and you cry a little more freely when you can hear someone three rows back doing the same. But Close Encounters earns that collective hush in a way few films do, and I want to explain why — right after a quick word on the premise.
The film follows Roy, a power-line worker in 1970s Indiana whose ordinary life comes apart after a late-night encounter with a UFO while he’s out chasing a blackout. He comes away marked: gripped by visions he can’t explain and a compulsion he can’t shake, watching his family slip away as the obsession takes hold. Running alongside him, an international team of scientists tracks a string of impossible events around the globe — planes and ships that vanished decades ago turning up intact, lights moving against the night sky, strange musical signals no one can source. Roy’s path crosses that of a single mother, Jillian, and her young son, Barry, who are being pulled toward the same mystery, until every thread converges on a remote stretch of American landscape.
Watching it now, what strikes me most is how patient and how confident the film is. It opens not on our heroes but on a series of vignettes scattered across the world, and it doesn’t introduce Roy or Jillian until roughly thirteen minutes in. That delay is deliberate: Spielberg builds a mosaic of mystery, a sense that something is happening everywhere at once, before he grounds us in two working-class lives. And even once we’re with them, the slow burn never lets up. It lets wonder accumulate, which is exactly the quality most sci fi films are science fiction is in too much of a hurry to reach.
The pacing drew comment even in 1977. Watch it today, when a video has two or three seconds to hook you before a thumb moves on, and the composure of Spielberg’s second blockbuster is almost startling. He trusts us to wait, and the payoff is enormous.
Thematically, it’s a quintessential baby-boomer film, and it works by turning the 1950s alien-invasion picture inside out. Arriving after the Apollo missions and in the long hangover of Vietnam and Watergate, it holds wonder and suspicion in the same hand. The skies may be benevolent, but the institutions are not: the government fabricates a chemical-spill scare and rolls in the military to keep ordinary people from learning the truth.
Visually, it’s built around light. Spielberg and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond fill the frame with head-on flares, hard silhouettes, backlit windows, and curtains of dust, smoke, and fog — all of it hinting at something vast just past the edge of what we can make out.
There’s a personal reading I can’t resist. Spielberg’s father was an engineer who helped build some early computers; his mother was a concert pianist. The film’s climax — humanity and the visitors finally speaking to each other through a computer synthesizer playing music — looks a great deal like a son reconciling his two parents on screen, almost certainly without meaning to.
Close Encounters is an essential science fiction film, and there’s no better moment to revisit it: it pairs beautifully with Spielberg’s new film, Disclosure Day, which just opened. See it on the big screen if you possibly can — but it’s also streaming now on the Criterion Channel.
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