Close Encounters tends to hold up more than Spielberg’s other alien movie of
the era, ET. It has less of the sugary sweetness of the latter movie and far
more suspense.
The film starts with a series of vignettes. An airliner is buzzed by a UFO.
Several 1940s planes, missing since just after the Second World War,
mysteriously appear again in the Mexican desert. A small boy is abducted by an
unknown force practically before the shocked eyes of his mother, Jillian
Guiler, played by Melinda Dillon. A utility repairman, Roy Neary, played by
Richard Dreyfuss, has a strange encounter with bright lights in the sky on a
lonely, country road. Clearly something is up.
Neary starts to make strange structures in shaving cream and mashed
potatoes. His wife and children soon conclude that he’s going crazy. Yet, the
compulsion continues. Meanwhile, a secret government organization seems to be
aware of the aliens and have divined, so they think, their intentions. One of
the experts in the secret organization is a French scientist played by the
great film director Francois Truffaut.
Meanwhile, a television newscast shows Neary the source of his obsession.
The area around Devil’s Tower, a mountain in Wyoming,
is being cordoned off by the government. The excuse is the accidental release
of a toxic poison. But, we know that the real reason is that the aliens are
going to land there. Neary, knowing now what he must do, sets forth.
He is not the only one being “called” by the unknown force, He meets Jillian
Guiler, the mother whose son was taken, and—despite the well intentioned
interference of the government organization, the two make it to the landing
site, which has been festooned with all sorts of high tech equipment (by 1970s
standards) in anticipation of the alien landing. What happens next, when the
aliens do land, is awe inspiring.