Visit from A Nice planet

...By vindicating the estrangement of the implantees without turning them into disaffected intellectuals—who would be genuine aliens to Middle America (compared to them even a spaceman would appear neighborly)—Spielberg unmasks himself as the Frank Capra of the 1970s...

...It has already matched Jaws in wooden acting, silly script and second-rate special effects...

...Typically, a man of thought discovered an alien presence, but could not convince the authorities of the imminent threat it posed...

...His star-crossed lovers are merely the most recent versions of a familiar figure in American literature and movies: the tormented and sensitive introvert, alienated by his vision from the vulgarity of his surroundings...

...the last 45 minutes of the film soothingly add: "But don't worry, they're friendly—and they're just like us...

...I'm loathe to ascribe the dignity of religion to the pap of Close Encounters...

...Further, Spielberg's UFOs are seen only at night (contrary to actual reported sightings) in order to maximize the effect of the flashing lights and minimize the limitations of the fake sets and the matte painting...

...This sort of self-indulgence, combined with the bad technology, assures the failure of Close Encounters...

...Why they couldn't touch down in the flatlands of Indiana remains a mystery...

...Spielberg has obligingly provided a solution in Close Encounters: The implantees are set off from their benighted peers by the force of a vision emanating from beings who are themselves alienfated...

...He then throws his energy into trying to capture his vision in the form of a huge sculpture that he models in the living room of his ranch house...

...Indeed, Close Encounters is such a perfect paean to pinheadedness, it would be a shame if Spielberg and Columbia were to go (relatively) unrewarded...

...My instinctive reaction was that Spielberg had made a serious error unveiling these rather plain aliens...

...Because of the strange circumstances surrounding her son's disappearance, she becomes the unwilling object of national media coverage, a misfortune that only drives her further into self-imposed isolation...

...The lengthiest and dreariest sections of Close Encounters are set in, of all places, Muncie, Indiana, a town alien beings have selected (apparently along with several other Middle American towns, although this is never really made clear) to establish limited contact with Planet Earth...

...Spielberg supposedly employed a computerized camera setup akin to George Lucas' "Dyksiraflex," but there is no evidence of its use...

...In short, the "little people" have direct access to phenomena that elude brainier types...

...its theological message is nothing more profound than "Have a Nice Day...

...According to Hynek, encounters with UFOs fall into three categories: sightings, physical evidence and direct contact...

...Then I realized he must have deliberately made them ordinary looking, in keeping with his strategy of reassuring the "average Joe...

...The archetype is, of course, Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, concerning a physician struggling against an extraterrestrial menace clearly symbolic of mass conformity...

...The next plot development reinforces the suspicions...

...therefore, it is not unreasonable to assume it will match Jaws at the box office...

...Had those cute little extraterrestrials started passing out "Smile...

...The landing of the Mother Ship—one Hying saucer touching down—involves none of the complex problems of angular displacement, depth of field and multiple spatial relationships present throughout the dogfight sequences in Star Wars...

...Spielberg is a flop both as director and writer...

...Leaving aside the simple fact that beings sophisticated enough to fly through space could kidnap a child without causing refrigerators to burst open, stoves to self-ignite and vacuum cleaners to run spontaneously, the special effects in a similar scene in the perfectly dreadful movie Demon Seed were vastly superior...

...Unfortunately, the film devotes an hour-and-a-half to encounters of the first two kinds...

...The promos for Close Encounters proclaim, "We are not alone...

...What iv evident is the reason Spielberg adorned the Mother Ship with thousands of flashing lights: to distract the eye from the saucer's rim, whose mechanical superimposition on the background is all too apparent...

...Small wonder that those "blessed" with a "psychic connection" are also estranged...

...Pundits have already predicted that the real Academy Awards battle will be between Close Encounters and Star Wars in the special effects category...

...unfortunately, it doesn't...

...The sequence proceeds blindingly and deafeningly for close to 10 minutes, and I kept thinking: I sat through nearly two hours for this...

...By thus blending science fiction and what Lionel Trilling called the "adversary culture," the director has managed the remarkable trick of simultaneously excoriating and extolling Middle America...

...by the time it finally gets around to the third, in the final 45 minutes, those in the audience still awake deserve much more than the feeble climax Spielberg has engineered...

...Among the "implantees" are Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), a power company repairman who stumbles on a UFO during a mysterious blackout, and Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon), the mother of a young boy (Cary Guffey) the spacemen have kidnapped...

...perfection doesn't come along very often...

...On Screen VISIT FROM A NICE PLANET by robert asahina After spending $18 million to make Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Columbia Pictures had to spend another $4 million on a promotional campaign explaining the cumbersome title...

...If this had any basis in fact, Close Encounters would be worth seeing for its technical details alone...

...Some critics have noted a religious significance to the climax, with the arrival of the Mother Ship as sort of a Second Coming, and the aliens representing angels...

...For while the implantees are outcasts in their once-comfortable suburban environment, it must be remembered that the extraterrestrials chose precisely these "average Joes" for the initial psychic contact, in preference to scientists or intellectuals...

...It seems that Steven Spielberg, the movie's writer/director, borrowed the pseudoscientific phrase from J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer and UFOlogist who served as a technical consultant to the project...

...This represents a fundamental break with the classic science-fiction films of the '50s, where the most common sociological theme was a thinly disguised highbrow paranoia...

...At first, the extraterrestrials merely dazzle the local yokels with celestial light shows, clogging the backroads of Indiana with spectators patiently gnawing on Kentucky Fried Chicken while awaiting the nightly performances...

...The Mother Ship finally responds in kind, and the result is a Moog duet—Muzak of the spheres— seemingly scored by an autistic child (actually, by John Williams, which amounts to about the same thing), complete with strobelight show...

...Spielberg and Columbia doubtless expect Close Encounters to be equally successful...

...Consider as well the "invasion" of Jillian's home...

...Similarly, when the extraterrestrials show themselves, they distressingly resemble terrestrial children decked out in gold lame Halloween costumes (courtesy, as it happens, of Carlo Rambaldi, whose incompetence was most recently on display in King Kong...

...A research team, backed by the government, is also heading for the Devil's Tower and an encounter of the third kind...

...We most recently saw this kind of hokey exhibition of inexorable Fate in Claude Lelouche's latest movie...

...One begins to suspect that the real alien is the director, though, since he dwells in simple-minded fashion not only on the chicken-munching but on the most obvious and tiresome trademarks of the heartland (McDonald's, Sara Lee, Budweiser, etc...

...His cloying sentimentality about the masses also helps account for the peculiarly dull climax of Close Encounters...

...buttons, 1 would not have been surprised...

...In Close Encounters, by contrast, science and scientists take a back seat to the common man...

...As Roy and Jillian scale the Devil's Tower, he loses his footing and slides down one of the plaster of paris boulders, and she reaches down to help him dimb back up—a heavy-handed quote from Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest...

...When the long-awaited Mother Ship—looking about as capable of interplanetary travel as any gigantic chandelier would—finally lands on the Devil's Tower, the scientists begin communicating with it by repeatedly broadcasting variations on a five-note theme that, like the vision of the mountain, has figured throughout the story as a clue to the outsiders' arrival...

...But its leader, Claude Lacombe (Francois Truffaut), a French scientist, concedes the prior claims of the implantees: "After all, they were invited...

...Other weaknesses are more blatant...

...The extraterrestrials establish a "psychic connection" with some of the spectators by "implanting" in them a blurred vision of what we discover, after another hour or so, is the Devil's Tower in Wyoming, a mountain peak the aliens have chosen as their landing site...

...After all...

...In case we didn't catch the reference, a voice announces on a loudspeaker from the nearby landing strip, "UFOs coming from the North-Northwest...

...but unlike his French counterpart, Spielberg is not interested in romance...

...Roy's increasing obsession with understanding his psychic experience results in his losing his job and later his family, following domestic squabbles that mirror the soap operas flickering across the screen of the family's TV set...

...At one point, he even tells Roy, "I envy you...

...Until now, how such a paragon could spring from our barren native soil was always puzzling...

...Inevitably the two meet, drawn to Wyoming and each other by their shared vision...

...Judging from his short career (he is 30), the one thing-he does well is make movies that make money: Until Star Wars came along, his previous hit, Jaws, was the fastest-and largest-grossing film ever...

...At the same time, Jillian, whose means of support are never shown, spends her days painting pictures of a mountain she has never seen...