PhantomKnight Goes Spielbergian

Also Gremlins

Night Skies became several movies, even beyond Spielberg. Signs (produced by Frank Marshall) is Night Skies.

Also, the Blumhouse movie Dark Skies, which is quite literally Night Skies, just without the farm setting.

I rewatched Close Encounters for reasons and it further clarified how crazy Neverending is. It's maybe my second favourite Spielberg movie. Maybe. Richard Dreyfuss's performance is a huge part of things. He's so good. Won the Oscar that year for the wrong movie.

Hell yeah. Justice for Krakozhia.

Hey, now, don't rag on The Terminal.  That movie's goddamn delightful.

Still waiting for PG Cooper’s video essay

Is it spamming to share my video a third time in one day? Maybe, but I promised PhantomKnight I'd be here so I gotta deliver.

In preparation for Phantom's E.T. review here's the audition tape of Henry Thomas:

After Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg felt a desire to make another movie about contact with alien life. The initial form of said follow-up, however, was very different. It started out as a project called Night Skies, which would've seen a rural family terrorized by aliens descending upon their farmhouse. That particular plot would eventually be molded into Poltergeist, with the help of Tobe Hooper. But still, Spielberg wanted to do another alien movie -- while also incorporating elements of his own childhood after the production of 1941 caused him to have to abandon a sort of autobiographical project entitled Growing Up. So, he met with screenwriter Melissa Mathison, and thus, E.T. was born.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial can easily be considered a staple of many people's childhood, especially if you're of a certain age. Me myself having been born in 1990, this was definitely a movie I remember watching as a child...yet as I grew older, sort of just fell out of the rotation. As such, I think the last time I watched it in full before now must have been in either the late 90's or early 00's. I've been trying to figure out why that is, though, cause from what I remember, I didn't dislike it at all. Maybe it's because this movie has a more quiet, less energetic charm to it than a lot of what I was watching at the time. Because while this is most certainly a family film, with an almost universal (no pun intended) appeal, it's also very confident in that it knows it doesn't need to constantly throw wacky humor or crazy misadventures at you every five minutes like a lot of other family films. Instead -- for what it is -- E.T. is a largely sophisticated movie (and in sophisticated family films, insults like "penis breath" are definite hallmarks) that knows where to draw its power from: the main friendship between a boy and an alien at the heart of the story.

This isn't a movie driven so much by plot as it is by emotion, and in that regard, E.T. succeeds. We don't need to care so much about why E.T. and his race came to Earth in the first place or how exactly he's going to get back -- all we need to care about is is that Elliot forms such a strong bond with E.T. that he feels motivated to help and keep him out of harm's way. And that's precisely where Steven Spielberg and Melissa Mathison succeed. E.T. can sort of be seen as the beginning of the more sentimental qualities that Spielberg would come to be known for in a lot of his work, and it's a hell of a debut for such sensibilities. Just like with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, we once again get a fractured family unit at the center of all the drama, and this is where you can see Spielberg drawing on his own experiences with a father-less childhood. The early scenes showing how this family works without a Dad certainly have an air of authenticity to them, which gives them a sort of quiet power. In particular, Dee Wallace turns in some very strong work as the mother trying to hold everything together. But you know, watching these scenes made me realize something. As much as Spielberg is known for his sense of spectacle and whatnot, he's also really adept at rendering relatable portraits of families, especially if there's emotional baggage there. Seeing the way this family is with each other really helps establish the emotional throughline for the film, but more importantly, firmly establishes the point of view Spielberg would tell this story from: that of a kid's, in this case, Elliot.

Spielberg and Melissa Mathison first achieve this by making Elliot sympathetic, but more importantly, mainly just your average kid. He's in need of something to help him cope with the divorce of his parents, and that's where E.T. comes in. Ultimately, this is a movie about friendship and childlike wonder, and Spielberg expresses the latter in more than one way. The obvious one is the way in which he shoots a lot of the movie. Apart from Elliot's mother, every adult here is shot both from behind and sort of at waist-level. My assessment of this is that Elliot's mom is perhaps supposed to be the only one worthy or capable of "being in the club", so to speak, whereas every other adult here is an authority figure of some kind. And it's not until they're made aware of E.T.'s existence where we see their faces. But consider the Peter Coyote character. For most of the movie, he's presented as the faceless villain, but when E.T. becomes sick, there's one line of dialogue he has that wipes away any preconceived notions of villains in this story: "He came to me, too. I've been wishing for this since I was ten years old." It just reinforces the film's theme of childlike wonder; nearly every character in this is a child at heart. A theme Spielberg would later deal with again in Hook years later. Sidenote: there's a scene here in which the mom is reading Peter Pan to Gertie.

And that theme feeds into how well-done the emotionality of this movie really is. Because we buy into Elliot and E.T.'s friendship so much, we feel Elliot's pain just as much as he does when E.T. falls gravely ill -- although I'll admit, that section of the movie feels a bit too drawn-out and it comes in kind of abruptly. And we're just as caught up in the ending. Basically, Spielberg showed here how skilled he would become at emotionally playing his audience like a fiddle, but the sentimentality is well-earned. Another facet of this is John Williams' music, which is phenomenal and some of his best work.

Or, you know...you can grow older and still hold an appreciation for some of the more wholesome things.