Close Encounter of the Third Kind, written and directed by Steven Spielberg - 8 out of 10

Close Encounter of the Third Kind, written and directed by Steven Spielberg 
8 out of 10


If you are of the opinion that intelligent beings, civilizations might exist on other planets, in far corners of the universe, then the idea of Close Encounters of the Third Kind is not so ridiculous, impossible or both.

Nevertheless, there are passages that even for a firm believer in extraterrestrial beings and their haunting of various places on this planet might seem preposterous and badly presented.
For this cinephile, the very long, annoying minutes when Roy Neary, the character that comes closest to being the main protagonist, played by Richard Dreyfuss, has an obsession, nightmare or maybe a vision for some.

As he had just had one of those Close Encounters, even if his could have been of the Second Kind, for it is hard to draw the line, he is surely affected and the Aliens have had an impact on his mind.
Even so, the insistence on the building of a small mountain in his family's living room is for this viewer the anticlimax of the film.

Yes, I get that having contact with the other world must be or could be transformational.
But to go on and on over this has the opposite effect to the one intended.

Repetition is of course an artistic method.
Used in literature, art in general.

In this motion picture it is annoying and overbearing.
The hero sits at table and while his wife and children eat, he begins to pile up his food on the plate.

Then he starts making a mole on the table.
Again, he has seen something important, a key to the plot.

There is no spoiler here, when I say that the extraterrestrials might gather on the mountain that the protagonist replicates in his house.
And some time spent on this art work that is a symbol and message would be just fine.

There is also the comedy  that audiences better equipped with a sense of humor would get here.
On the following morning, unhappy with his work in the middle of the living room, Roy Neary is out early, before the rest of the family is "woke" ...to use a fashionable term in the political language of this day.

Indeed, spouse and children are startled and wake up when the frantic pater familias destroys the small garden they have.
The bushes near the house are uprooted and torn apart by the frenzied, possessed, haunted man.

And Richard Dreyfuss knows how to portray this emotion.
Which means that a much shorter version of this frantic, overlong scene would have worked much better.
Not satisfied with bushes, bricks and earth thrown through the window, in the sink and all over the kitchen, he has to get more.

A puzzled, rather amusing neighbor is watching all the uproar while drying her hair with a blow dryer.
She tries to protest when the lunatic comes to take away the fences protecting her ducks, floating on a small pond.

When she sees the state in which the evidently mad man is, she has another comic moment:

"never mind what I said...take them...take them!"
Or something similar to that

Instead of a few minutes, this orgy of building a damn mole in a room takes half the film...
Well, not quite...

But it certainly felt like that.
We all know from Einstein that time is relative and this was one of those proofs.

Eleven minutes (maybe) that seemed to be one hundred.

Having insisted too much on this aspect, making the same stupid mistake that I blamed on a young, inexperienced Spielberg- the Sacred Monster of the present-, I must highlight the fact that the movie has had a tremendous impact.
It was such a landmark that I remember exactly the circumstances of the first Close Encounter.

I saw it at the Gloria cinema, in the district of my childhood and teenage years, with Serban Popescu, a friend at that time and 'comandant de pioneri' in our school.
We took a long time to discuss the ending, what does it mean, if we will see 'them' in the future, flaws, but most of the time, the I ingenuity, wondrous moments of a film that I think we both loved...

In other words, forget about the criticism, exaggerated and overblown, of the mole building in the house, and consider watching this film, for it has its undisputed attractions.

One of them would be that Francois Truffaut, the legendary director is...acting in it, and he has one of the major roles.