Word: alien
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...with alien life forms?but, of course, no one will believe his story. The rest of Close Encounters' plot follows Roy and several other UFO sighters, including a mysterious international scientist (Truffaut) and a neighborhood woman (Dillon), as they overturn their lives in a mad attempt to arrange a rendezvous with the extraterrestrial visitors. When an earthling makes actual contact with aliens, that is "a close encounter of the third kind." (The first kind is sighting; the second, physical evidence...
...gaffes fade from memory once Close Encounters reaches its climax?for which Spielberg saves the most spectacular futuristic effects. Even here, it is the director, not the technical staff, who causes the movie to take flight. In Spielberg's benign view, the confrontation between human and alien is an ecstatic evolutionary adventure, rather than a potentially lethal star war; it is a wondrous opportunity for man to be reborn. When the earthlings and the visitors at last communicate in the film, bellowing "Hello" to each other in bursts of light and music, it is like hearing a child speak...
...spaceships, robots and aircars were made to look so hard-edged, so real and on occasion so dented and dirty that audiences felt they could reach out and touch them. In Close Encounters, the flying saucers, the giant mother ship and the extraterrestrial creatures are meant to look alien and so formless that the imagination is forced to fill in the details. "We went for a style that is nebulous but with brilliant light," explains Special Effects Chief Douglas Trumbull, who also created the effects of Stanley Kubrick's 2001. "In a way, it's going back...
Once the drawings were approved, it took Rambaldi three months to build the alien that emerges from the mother ship to greet Truffaut. Spielberg and the crew nicknamed him Puck. The other aliens were propelled by simple machinery or by dwarfs, but Puck was animated in the same way that King Kong II was, through a combination of mechanical and hydraulic gadgets. There were even artificial tendons in his face, and by pushing levers 45 feet away, an operator could make Puck do everything but scratch his stomach and laugh like Santa Claus. "He doesn't have a wide...
...Standard verdure grows and decays; Lionni's plants do neither. Instead, writes Lionni, they exist outside of time, "like a memory that has taken on actuality." These matterless, insubstantial greens, he notes, "though impervious to any violent acts of nature, disintegrate at the least contact with an object alien to their normal environment, dissolving into dust and leaving only a chemically inert white powder." Spotting the organisms, which fall into two basic groups, tests faculties of the most accomplished observers. "Those of the first group are directly discernible by the senses and indirectly by instruments," explains Lionni, "while those...