Close Encounters of the Third Kind rereleased to theaters

Sometimes I just miss the 'warm' look of older Spielberg movies. Kaminski is phantastic but has this certain coldness to his style that I find always to be there.

 

Those could be color-correction decisions. We'll see what Spielberg does with West Side Story next year.

 

I just saw this movie recently. I'm not a big sci-fi fan though I have enjoyed some sci-fi movies.

I think this movie's biggest appeal is to people who saw it in 1977. I don't want to say the film is dated but there is almost no way to view something in 2019 for the first time and feel the way you'd feel if you viewed it for the first time in 1977, when I think the world was more mysterious and people were more impressionable.

As a film in and of itself, I'd give it probably 6/10. To me, breaking it down, we have a story about UFO sightings. Then one guy goes crazy (not believably so, they should have tuned that down a bit and just made him very obsessive - the throwing dirt into his kitchen bit was silly), and then the story turns to people trying to get to the big hill where this is happening. This is basically the movie until the big payoff when we get what? Musical tones and then some brief mingling with aliens like they are all at a cocktail party.

No questions are answered - like how did these people know about the big hill, why did the aliens take people, why did they choose the people they chose, what did they do with them, what was man's response to the events over the course of time, why did we seem to trust the aliens, etc.

I guess the point was not about answering these questions but as a viewer I wanted them to dig in a little deeper because the movie just felt really shallow for something that lasted over 2 hours and dealt with this subject matter.

To me the term 'dated' means more than this. It's not about clothing styles, or whether people have cellphones, or the lack of computer checks, or synthesizers in music. Ok, it is about those things, but that is surface stuff, stuff that will make all things dated eventually. I think the term, when leveled as a criticism, cuts much deeper.

I can watch movies from the '30s, '40's, 50's, and 60's and have no issues. I love watching Hitchcock movies, many of which are from those times. The story and the events that transpire transcend all the superficial dated aspects that come with movies from this time period.

To me, 'dated' would mean a movie that does not have that, or does not have enough of that, so that all one can see is the fact that the movie came from another time. To compare it to 80's music - there is music from the 80's that uses synthesizers, but the music is great and it's timeless. That's not dated any more than just on the surface; to be truly dated, that would be those songs that have not held up, maybe because the use of synthesizers was too much, or there just wasn't a great song there. 60's music is the same; a lot of it sounds dated to me because many songs just have too much of that sound and certain kinds of lyrics, but there are many songs from that period that still hold up today.

I think everything eventually becomes dated if you look at it on the surface, but what the term is really about is does something stand up to time, so that it can be appreciated decades later by people of a different generation? I think Close Encounters has enough of that - I wouldn't call it dated. I just personally didn't think it was a great film.

 

Ah, well I am certainly very familiar with that!

No worries; now I understand!

 

Just watched it on a small screen in the local library. Must say I found it over-wrought and boring compared to my vague memories of seeing it when it was a new movie. I suffer from too many years watching X-files...

I guess it was one of those themes that humans seem to need when they search for meaning in life ( a higher power). I do remember once criticizing 2001 for its use of the God thing, as I called the Monolith and the introduction of tools to the apes.

And it was very hard to make out dialogue when 5 people are speaking at once

 

That makes me laugh

 

I remember seeing it on network TV in the early '80s as a kid when I was too young to understand a lot of it and definitely being haunted and amazed by the ending. And also being amused by Dreyfuss playing with his mashed potatoes. Watching it at a later age, it's like Jaws to me. There is a certain "you had to be there" feel to it. I don't walk away feeling truly amazed or that the story really connected to me. I DO feel that sense of personal amazement when going back to watch 2001. Jaws and CE3K are interesting and entertaining and I might still call them great movies. Maybe they just don't have the same impact on rewatching them because the pacing of the movies is so built around the surprises at the end. How many "great" scenes come in Jaws or CE3K before the third act? In Spielberg's 1980s and up movies, there are great scenes that are different people's favorites throughout the whole running time.

I really came here to post this. The original Siskel and Ebert review of Close Encounters has just shown up on the internet for the first time ever. I don't think anyone's seen this since 1977 unless they had their own videotape copy: