Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Columbia Pictures· USA· 138 min· English
Directed by Steven SpielbergMusic by John Williams
Synopsis
After a close encounter with a UFO, Indiana power-company lineman Roy Neary becomes obsessed with a mountain shape he can't explain — one of hundreds of ordinary people worldwide being quietly invited to a rendezvous the government is racing to keep secret.
Review
Released just months after Star Wars, Close Encounters is its temperamental opposite: not a war in the stars but a religious experience with landing lights. Spielberg's aliens don't invade — they communicate, in colors and five notes, and the film's radical proposition is that first contact might be an act of grace.
What makes it endure is how much of it is a domestic drama. Richard Dreyfuss's Roy Neary is wrecked by wonder; his obsession with a mountain he's never seen costs him his family in scenes that are harder to watch than any alien abduction. Spielberg later admitted he'd write the ending differently as a father — and that tension between transcendence and abandonment is the film's dark, beating heart.
Douglas Trumbull's effects remain among the most beautiful ever photographed: UFOs as living carnivals of light, and a mothership that plays music like a cathedral organ the size of a city. The finale at Devils Tower — scientists and pilgrims answering tones with tones — is pure cinema, wordless and ecstatic, the closest the movies have come to staging a benediction.
Trivia & Color Notes
Hynek's real scale
A 'close encounter of the third kind' — observation of occupants — is a genuine category from astronomer J. Allen Hynek's UFO classification. Hynek consulted on the film and appears at the landing site, pipe in hand.
The mothership's stowaways
Look closely at the mothership model (now in the Smithsonian): its greebled surface hides an R2-D2, a mailbox, a VW bus and a small cemetery — gifts from the model makers to eagle-eyed viewers.
A hangar bigger than a stage
No soundstage could hold the Devils Tower landing site, so production converted a WWII dirigible hangar in Mobile, Alabama — six times the size of Hollywood's biggest stage.
Clouds in a water tank
The roiling cloud formations were created by injecting white tempera paint into tanks of salt and fresh water, filmed at high speed — a Trumbull technique later reused across the genre.
Mashed potato mountain
Dreyfuss sculpting Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes was so iconic that 'mashed potato moment' became shorthand among filmmakers for an obsession the audience can see before the character understands it.
The film takes UFO folklore seriously but grounds it in a real scientific framework: the title comes from astronomer J. Allen Hynek's actual classification system for UFO reports (Hynek cameos at the finale). The musical-mathematical communication scheme is a lovely dramatization of the real idea that mathematics and physics would be the only shared language with an alien intelligence. The spectacle around it — government cover-ups, implanted visions — is pure speculation.
🎵 Soundtrack
Music by John Williams
John Williams composed the five-note motif before filming, testing over 300 combinations with Spielberg. The score dissolves the line between sound effect and music — communication itself becomes the orchestra.
🔗 This film connects to…
Cast & Crew
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