In Close Encounters, Spielberg also notes the difficulties that earthlings have in communicating with each other. These films zero in on the idea of achieving real communication and understanding with beings who are not of this Earth. the Extra-terrestrial, Robert Zemeckis’s Contact and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. You can see its impact on the many UFO films that followed it in the past four decades, especially the more thoughtful ones like Spielberg’s E.T. What Close Encounters lacked in originality, it made up in influence. Close Encounters opens with an overture reminiscent of the otherworldly symphonies of Gyorgy Ligeti heard in 2001 and it concludes with a scene that recalls the eye-popping Star Gate sequence at the end of Kubrick’s opus. The film also pays serious homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, another movie about curious aliens. Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it “the best - the most elaborate - 1950s science fiction movie ever made.” Critics of the day praised its Spielbergian blend of science fiction and “When You Wish Upon a Star” storybook enchantment, while at the same time recognizing it was hardly a novel concept. It occurs to me that Close Encounters has aged well, better than anyone might have expected when the film first came out. Could the flash my wife and I saw have been little green men looking for cottage land - or worse, cottagers? The alien visitors of the film swoop down upon Earth with their brightly lit spacecraft, more out of curiosity than malice, although their habit of abducting humans makes them far from completely harmless. Then I thought of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the UFO movie from 40 years ago that’s getting an anniversary re-release in theatres this weekend.
A light from the sky seemed to be the only other option, but there was no sound of an aircraft or thunder.
We figured at first the flash might be the headlights of a car or boat, but we weren’t near the highway and the water was calm. Our summer rental, on the edge of a cliff overlooking beautiful Lake Kamaniskeg in the Madawaska Valley, is shrouded by pine trees. There should have been no light, apart from the faint glow of a crescent moon. My wife and I were relaxing at a cottage late the other weekend when a bright white flash of light outside the window startled us.
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