Other Titles • Close Encounters of the Third Kind • CE3K (1977) • The Close Encounter of the Third Kind (1977) • Watch the Skies (1976) • Steven Spielbergs Unheimliche Begegnung der dritten Art (1977) • Unheimliche Begegnung der dritten Art (1977) • Unheimliche Begegnung der dritten Art - Die neue Version (1981)
Synopses for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
1.
We Are Not Alone.
Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment proudly presents the definitive director's cut of Steven Spielberg's masterpiece. "Literate in plotting and dazzling in execution," Close Encounters of the Third Kind is "an absolute stunner!" (Variety)
And now for the first time on DVD, Steven Spielberg's enduring achievement can be seen and enjoyed as he has always intended, in this director's cut, remastered from the original film elements. "Of all the UFO films ever made this is the most edifying… a feast for the eyes! The appeal of this film was enormous and still is." (The Motion Picture Guide)
(19 votes)
2.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND is Steven Spielberg's extraordinary film about a man named Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) who becomes obsessed with meeting extraterrestrials after encountering a UFO on an abandoned road one night. Against the wishes of his wife (Teri Garr) and children, Neary, along with another witness to the sighting (Melinda Dillon), travels to a mysterious mountain where the government has built a landing strip hoping to attract the aliens. Director François Truffaut costars as Claude Lacombe, one of the organizers of the project. Spielberg hoped to follow up the huge success of JAWS with a low-budget film that would be an easy shoot, but, thanks in part to the complicated special effects, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS quickly snowballed into being an expensive endeavor but a commercial and artistic success. No one who has seen the film has ever looked at a plate of mashed potatotes the same way again.
(17 votes)
3.
Released in 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind was that year's cerebral alternative to Star Wars. It's arguably the archetypal Spielberg film, featuring a fantasy-meets-reality storyline (to be developed further in E.T.), a misunderstood Everyman character (Richard Dreyfuss), apparently hostile government agents (long before The X-Files), a sense of childlike awe in the face of the otherworldly, and a sweeping feel for epic film-making learned from the classic school of David Lean. Contributing to the film's overall success are the Oscar-winning cinematography from Vilmos Zsigmond, Douglas Trumbull's lavish effects and an extraordinary score from John Williams that develops from eerie atonality à la Ligeti to the gorgeous sentiment of "When You Wish Upon a Star" over the end credits.
Not content with the final result, Spielberg tinkered with the editing and inserted some new scenes to make a "Special Edition" in 1980 which ran three minutes shorter than the original, then made further revisions to create a slightly longer "Collector's Edition" in 1998. This later version deletes the mothership interior scenes that were inserted in the "Special Edition" and restores the original ending.
On the DVD:CE3K is packaged here with confusing documentation that fails to make clear any differences between earlier versions of the film and this "Collector's Edition"--worse, the back cover blurb misleadingly implies that this disc is the 1980 "Special Edition" edit. It is not. A gorgeous anamorphic widescreen print of Spielberg's 1998 "Collector's Edition" edit occupies the first disc: this is the version with the original theatrical ending restored but new scenes from the "Special Edition" retained.
The second disc rounds up sundry deleted scenes that were either dropped from the original version or never made it into the film at all--fans of the "Special Edition" can find the mothership interior sequence here. The excellent "making-of" documentary dates from 1997 and has interviews with almost everyone involved, including the director speaking from the set of Saving Private Ryan. Thankfully the superb picture and sound of the feature make this set entirely compelling and more than compensate for the inadequate packaging. --Mark Walker
(18 votes)
4.
Anybody who has written him off because of his string of stinkers--or anybody who's too young to remember The Goodbye Girl--may be shocked at the accomplishment and nuance of Richard Dreyfuss's performance in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Here, he plays a man possessed; contacted by aliens, he (along with other members of the "chosen") is drawn toward the site of the incipient landing: Devil's Tower, in rural Wyoming. As in many Spielberg films, there are no personalized enemies; the struggle is between those who have been called and a scientific establishment that seeks to protect them by keeping them away from the arriving spacecraft. The ship, and the special effects in general, are every bit as jaw-dropping on the small screen as they were in the theater (well, almost). Released in 1977 as a cerebral alternative to the swashbuckling science fiction epics then in vogue, Close Encounters now seems almost wholesome in its representation of alien contact and interested less in philosophizing about extraterrestrials than it is in examining the nature of the inner "call." Ultimately a motion picture about the obsession of the driven artist or determined visionary, Close Encounters comes complete with the stock Spielberg wives and girlfriends who seek to tether the dreamy, possessed protagonists to the more mundane concerns of the everyday. So a spectacular, seminal motion picture indeed, but one with gender politics that are all too terrestrial. --Miles Bethany
DVD features The Collector's Edition (CE) represents Steven Spielberg's third version of Close Encounters. Created in 1998, this sequence contains most of the judicial edits made for the Special Edition (SE) in 1980, speeding up Roy Neary's first contact with the UFOs and adding a scene of a discovery in the Mongolian desert. The CE also reinstates the comical madness of Neary tearing up his own front yard, replaced in the SE by a scene where he breaks down in the shower; both scenes are restored in the CE. The SE's revised ending, featuring an extended scene inside the mothership is deleted. The two-disc DVD set includes an extensive 100-minute documentary that was produced in 2000 and incorporates footage seen on an earlier laserdisc version. Also shown are 11 deleted scenes including the footage aboard the mothership, and scenes introducing Lacombe (François Truffaut) that were jettisoned in the initial release when Spielberg shot a new opening. One of the laserdisc's features--the ability to play all the different versions--is missing here, but the excellent image and sound quality (the latter is better here than most theatergoers witnessed in theaters) makes this a grand DVD. --Doug Thomas
(17 votes)
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