Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
★★★½ — Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
There are films that arrive at precisely the right cultural moment and seem to change the atmosphere of cinema overnight. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, released in November 1977, was one of them. Coming hard on the heels of Jaws, it confirmed Steven Spielberg as the defining popular filmmaker of his generation and offered audiences something genuinely unusual: a science fiction film in which first contact with extraterrestrial life was treated not as a military emergency or a horror scenario, but as something closer to a religious experience. The premise is deceptively simple. Roy Neary, an everyday electricity linesman in Indiana, has a roadside encounter with unidentified flying objects one night and finds himself unable to shake the aftermath, drawn compulsively toward a vision he cannot yet identify or explain. What follows is a slow, sometimes unsettling, sometimes awe-struck journey toward one of the most celebrated sequences in Hollywood history.
The production sits at an interesting intersection of British and American filmmaking, backed by Columbia Pictures alongside EMI Films and the Julia/Michael Phillips production banner. Spielberg was, by 1977, already a director who had demonstrated an extraordinary instinct for building dread and release, qualities he had honed years earlier in work such as Duel. Here he turned those instincts toward something altogether more optimistic in its ambitions. One notable and slightly unusual piece of casting was French New Wave director François Truffaut in the role of the French scientist Claude Lacombe, a piece of cinephile fan service that doubles as a genuine performance, warm and credible throughout. The screenplay is Spielberg's own, and the film's distinctive musical language, the five-note motif that becomes a form of interstellar communication, was developed in close collaboration with composer John Williams, whose score is as central to the film's identity as anything on screen.
Richard Dreyfuss carries the film on his shoulders, and it is worth noting that he was already a recognisable face to audiences who had seen him in American Graffiti before his collaboration with Spielberg on Jaws made him a proper star. His performance here has a raw, slightly dishevelled quality that keeps Roy grounded even as the story around him tips into the extraordinary. Teri Garr plays his increasingly bewildered wife with a grounded naturalism that makes the domestic collapse at the film's centre feel genuinely painful rather than merely functional, and Melinda Dillon brings a quiet, nervous intensity to a mother whose child has been taken by something she cannot begin to describe. Bob Balaban rounds out the principal cast as an interpreter caught between the official government line and something far stranger. The film was a considerable commercial and critical success on release, and its influence on subsequent science fiction, on the look of alien craft, on the grammar of wonder, on the idea that contact might mean something other than catastrophe, is difficult to overstate. At 137 minutes it is also, by modern blockbuster standards, a patient film. Whether that patience is a virtue or a liability rather depends on your tolerance for Spielberg in a slow-burn mood.
There’s no question that Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a landmark in science fiction cinema. It's a film that helped redefine how we imagine contact with the unknown. Steven Spielberg trades horror and suspicion for awe and wonder, crafting a story not about invasion, but about connection, curiosity, and the human need to reach beyond the stars. The final act, with its towering mothership, radiant light show, and five-note musical greeting, is still deeply moving, a rare moment in film where the sublime feels almost sacred. It’s also a film everyone should experience at least once, if only to understand its influence. Richard Dreyfuss gives a committed, almost trance-like performance as Roy Neary, a man unravelling in pursuit of something he can’t explain, and the score by John Williams swells with the kind of cosmic grandeur that only Spielberg and Williams together could pull off. But time hasn’t been kind to all of it. The special effects, once revolutionary, now look REALLY dated, the glowing UFOs zipping across the sky with obvious wirework and optical compositing can’t help but feel quaint, even silly, by modern standards. And the middle section drags hard with long stretches of Roy obsessively shaping mashed potatoes into Devil’s Tower, or government agents silently collecting evidence, test the patience. It’s meant to build mystery, but too often it just feels slow. Still, for all its flaws, Close Encounters earns its place in the pantheon. It’s a film of ambition, emotion, and genuine wonder. A reminder of a time when the unknown didn’t just mean danger, but possibility. It may creak in places, but its heart still shines. See it once. Just maybe turn the brightness up.
I keep coming back to that tension between what this film means historically and what it actually feels like to sit through it today. The reverence is earned, no question, but reverence alone doesn't stop a middle act from feeling padded, and it doesn't make optical compositing look any fresher than it does. It's one of those films where I find myself watching it slightly differently depending on whether I'm thinking about its place in cinema history or just watching it as a film on a Tuesday evening. Spielberg would return to similar territory with E.T. and find something arguably more emotionally coherent in a tighter package. Close Encounters remains essential viewing, a film that genuinely earns the word "landmark" rather than just having it applied by habit. But essential and flawless are two very different things, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably remembering the mothership more clearly than the mashed potatoes.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1977 | Watched: 2025-08-01
Trailer
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Steven Spielberg: Duel (1971) · E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) · The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) · Jurassic Park (1993)
More with Richard Dreyfuss: American Graffiti (1973) · Jaws (1975)
More from United Kingdom: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) · Blue (1993)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Fantastic Planet (1973) · Nightmare City (1980) · The Long Walk (2025)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
