Close Encounters of the Third Kind

For his fourth film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the brilliant director Steven Spielberg departed from the usual vision of aggressive and evil aliens and instead created friendly, intelligent and noble beings from other galaxies. Many critics consider Close Encounters of the Third Kind to be a grown-up and sensible film, the antithesis of the mayhem unleashed by Star Wars in 1977.

The plot begins when airplanes, reported missing in 1945, suddenly reappear in the Mexican desert. Meanwhile, several people report UFO sightings, among them Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss), who becomes obsessed with the shape of a mountain that appears in his dreams. Later, he realises this is where the aliens will land. The government too, knows where the landing spot is but tries to mount a cover-up. But Neary and others like him are not deterred and arrive at the site. The encounter is extraordinary, especially when the mothership’s door opens and the extraterrestials descend, a product of Industrial Light and Magic’s technological genius and Steven Spielberg’s imagination. The image of the brightly-lit mothership, an enormous structure that used a musical language to tell humans that they came in peace, has gone down in cinema history.