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After Jaws made a lot of money, Steven Spielberg decided to work on a more personal project: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He has credit for the screenplay, but at least five or six other writers also worked on the script, yet Spielberg got sole credit for supposively doing very little writing. On the other hand, one of the earliest movies Spielberg did when he was a teen was a flick about a UFO, so maybe he's doing a re-make of sorts of an older idea of his. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is about Richard Dreyfuss building mountains out of mashed potatoes and seeing aliens while people think he's insane. This hasn't been my favorite Spielberg film and it still isn't. The pace is slow, although a scene near the end with aliens communicating with a "da da da da dummmm" musical piece is cool. It's amazing to see how good the special effects are in this movie considering there had no CG at the time. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of different versions of this movie out there-- including one with touched up CG (there's an interesting article to read about it on http://www.dvdfile.com). It's sluggish and has lots of Spielberg schmaltziness to it, but is sort of charming in an off-beat way. Watch it if you like mediocre UFO flicks. I give Close Encounters of the Third
Kind **1/2 out of ****. |