Close Encounters of the Third Kind – 1977
I’ll start by saying that this movie is among my top ten favorite movies of all time. I’ll try not to be too biased, and ask forgiveness if I gush a little about the special effects. They were incredible. True, they didn’t win the Oscar for the category, but they were up against the Star Wars juggernaut. And though I think this film gave Star Wars a run for its money, I agree with the Academy’s decision.
This was a movie about alien abduction, and first contact with an alien species. It started off with simple things like distant lights mysteriously moving through the night sky, but quickly picked up the pace when the lead character is accosted on a deserted road. It is a cool scene in which an impossibly bright light shines down on his truck and gravity seems to turn sideways. It was a perfectly executed effect, simply accomplished by rotating both the truck and the camera together and allowing everything in the truck, including its passenger, to fall. Later that night we are treated to a fantastic sequence of several oddly shaped alien crafts, glowing with bright and luminous colors, flying through the countryside.
Then the special effects seem to vanish for a while, until we reach the brief but super-creepy scene in which a little boy is aggressively and forcibly abducted, literally right out of his mother’s arms. But after that, the effects once again take a back seat to the story for a while, until the movie’s climax.
And what a climax it was! The U.S. government has set up a landing site for the aliens and they finally make their appearance. Dozens of the glowing ships arrive and use musical tones as a form of rudimentary communication. Then the amazing city-sized mother ship arrives and lands, allowing decades of abducted humans to return to the Earth. Then the aliens themselves come out. There were three kinds of aliens, a tall and spindly puppet that unfortunately looked pretty fake, a bunch of little girls in body suits, and an older-looking animatronic alien that exchanged sign-language hand signals with, and smiled at the government scientists. He looked good, except that he seemed to be rooted to the spot. His legs didn’t move at all.
In general, I loved all the glowing colors, all the thick and roiling clouds, and all the mysterious alien beings. The film’s effects were a feast for the eyes and ears. They were dazzling without being threatening or violent, except for maybe when the boy was taken from his mother. The detailed miniature model used to create the movie’s crowning achievement, the mother-ship, is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. And of course, I have to make mention of some fantastic matte-paintings used to show things like a massive tramp steamer in the middle of the Mongolian desert. I’d say that these effects, and all the other effects in the film, easily hold up to today’s standards. Well done!