CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Columbia 1977) Sony Home Entertainment
“In my early years with Noel Coward, he said, ‘My
dear, always come out of a new hole.’ But we don’t come out of any new holes
today, do we? We go back and come out again and again - out the same hole:
parts one, two, three and so on. And I think it’s terribly sad. Looking at the
list of recipients, everyone was an innovator, a path finder. They found new
things to do. And we all thrive on new things. Okay - do parts one, two, three.
But don’t make them the staple diet! We’ll sink if we do.
This business lives on creative pathfinders…I terribly
miss somebody like Irving Thalberg. He had a foot in both camps – creatively
and with the money. We’re in terrible danger. I think there are some wonderful
new picture makers. But please, you chaps in the money department…remember what
they are. Thalberg once said, ‘the
studio has made a lot of money…and it can afford to lose some!’ I think the
time has come where the money people can once again afford to ‘lose some’ by
taking risks with new film makers. If
they get a break, get encouragement…we are all going to come up and up. Anyhow,
wish them luck. I certainly do.”
- David Lean (accepting his AFI Lifetime
Achievement Award, 1990)
In more recent
times, director, Steven Spielberg has gone on record as saying contemporary
filmmaker's “have forgotten how to tell
stories.” I quite agree. Spielberg was, and remains, one of the last of the
more ‘painterly’ masters of his craft; someone so transparently influenced by
the true artists from Hollywood’s golden age. It would behoove us all to
reconsider how movies have digressed into a sort of frenetically energized
spectacle since David Lean’s speech at the AFI. Today’s movies owe more to the
nucleus of a badly drawn-out music video or overblown video game than what
Hitchcock once termed ‘pure cinema’.
Alas, too few, toiling behind the camera are intuitively qualified – or even in
possession of such daring – merely to take the time and set up a master shot,
positioning the camera to allow for the audience to fall in love with their
images. I will go Spielberg a step further and blame the handheld Steadicam for
this digression. Like all the creative tricks in the filmmakers’ toolbox, the
Steadicam has its place. Alas, it should never be considered the crutch to rely
upon. Ditto for ‘green screen’
compositing: this has made a generation of filmmakers lazy in their study of
light and shadow, wholly relying on digital matte process to achieve an
artificial mood.
Even more
fatal to the enduring appeal of American movies, today’s cinematographers have
somehow managed to homogenize their art into abject copycat. There was a time
when the search for visualized distinction was the Holy Grail. Now, the goal
seems to be to make every movie vaguely – if not directly – resemble the one
released just before it. Action and science fiction movies are particularly
guilty of this: a sort of uber-monochromatic ‘look’ with simplified, washed out color palettes, blown out
contrast levels, jittery handheld camerawork, and, in rapture for the John Woo
chop-shop editing style that has made visual mincemeat of most every scene in a
contemporary movie. For some time, this ‘way’ of making movies has been rather
erroneously sold as the new 'style'. Yet, upon careful consideration it is not
‘style’ so much as ‘technique’ – at least, of a kind – and decidedly not even
the best of all options, ideally suited for telling stories on film. The
argument peddled in its defense is that
“no one will sit through a 'slow' paced film these days”; frankly, an
insult to both the intelligence and patience of the avid film goer. Worst of
all, it has degraded American movies; made them disposable and unmemorable –
tapping into the popular zeitgeists of the immediate moment but without any
thought for longevity; either, of a particular movie’s staying power or, and
cumulatively, of the art form itself.
I would like
to extend a challenge to my readership and to up and coming film makers. Name
me a movie made this past year, likely to celebrate golden anniversaries
seventy-five or even fifty years later, beloved in the same way as a Gone With The Wind, The Wizard of Oz or The Sound of Music. Give me an example
of one movie within the last ten years to have gripped and shaken its audience
to their core with prolific and enduring messages, as The Bridge on the River Kwai or Network. Show me a single picture from the last twenty years as
profoundly humanistic as A Tree Grows in
Brooklyn, How Green Was My Valley
or The Song of Bernadette. Provide
an example of a comedy from the last decade to rival the remarkable
razor-backed sincerity of The
Americanization of Emily, The
Apartment or Annie Hall. I’m not
greedy. One title will do. Pitifully, even the ‘best’ Oscar-nominees from the last two decades have lacked such
staying power.
On a personal
note, as a devotee of cinema art, I increasingly get bored watching the 'new style' unravel my innate love for
‘the movies’ into frenetically visualized apoplexy. I don’t want to be
disappointed sitting there in the dark, though, frequently, I am. My
expectations are high - yes. But if you have not been thoroughly entertained –
I would suggest you ask for your money back. Movies are meant to fill up our
leisure. This should always remain their paramount function. Two hours of life
I can never get back ought to never be wasted on an endeavor that is merely
‘okay’. Consider how the cinema artists of yesteryear were working from a grave
technological deficit. Yet they gave us art of the highest (and occasionally,
lowest) order. Regardless, there was an innate striving – not only for getting
things done – but for doing them well and much better, in competition with the
next fella.
The Leans,
Hitchcocks, Cukors, Wylers, Wilders, etc. shared a passion for revealing unique
truths, exploiting that rareness only the medium of film can provide to
illustrate deeper realities about the human condition. I don’t see a lot – if
any – of such ‘verisimilitude’ happening in my movies these days. Objectively,
I do not think I am alone in this. The genre being discussed is irrelevant
because the effect today is virtually the same; barely passable, or even subpar
movie-land product being peddled as anesthetizing, rather than ‘enriching’
entertainment. When the dream factories retired their B-serials in the
mid-1950’s they also forfeited the right to feed us B-grade shlock masquerading
behind an A-list budget, taken over by clumsy editing, inferior acting and
ever-clever special effects. So, I say to all: Expect More From Your
Movie-Going Experiences! Do not settle for second best.
This lengthy dissertation
may seem a very longwinded way to reintroduce Spielberg’s own Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977) as the extraordinary achievement in science-fiction it remains to this
day. But such an example reminds us of a more leisurely pace in hand-crafted
movie magic. There was, to be sure, nothing relaxing about the breakneck
swiftness with which Spielberg directed the picture; a back-breaking schedule,
buffeted by setbacks and budgetary constraints. In 1977, Spielberg was already
the peerless master of his craft: sci-fi long neglected by the money merchants
as mere Saturday matinee trifles for the kiddies. But Spielberg had a far
better understanding of what science fiction could become; both, its precepts
as well as its hallmarks. Perhaps only in retrospect can we see Close Encounters as a Master’s class in
elevating sci-fi to a finely honed art form. Revisiting it again, I remain
thunderstruck by Spielberg’s comprehension and insightfulness; his deft
handling of the anamorphic visual space, calculating every moment for its
maximum impact.
The awesome
discipline exhibited by Spielberg in Close
Encounters of the Third Kind has, arguably, never been duplicated since in
the sci-fi genre, though it was generally overlooked by most critics of the day
as ‘dopey Hollywood mysticism’ with
Spielberg’s ‘tinker-toying it together
(to) make it enjoyable, mildly funny and -- in one sequence -- even credible.’
Even as many of these same critics enjoyed their experience – or at the very
least, their blood sport in writing about it – back then, they failed to give
Spielberg his due for providing the amusement fully formed and seemingly,
effortlessly. Yet, in Close Encounters we can clearly see,
not only the sheer brilliance and undiluted purity of the work itself, but
also, the wheels of its’ director’s mind intelligently deconstructing the
alien-abduction mythology. Spielberg illustrates his great respect for his
audience by affording them the opportunity to indulge and methodically digest
his interwoven stories – never encumbered by flashes of surround sound or
snippets of light and shadow, passing phantom-less, mindlessly, with only
feverishness before our eyes. Indeed, Spielberg knows how to tell a story on
celluloid. Regrettably, he has become the minority in Hollywood these days.
Thematically, at least, Close Encounters
tips its’ hat to two sci-fi classics without whom this intergalactic sojourn
might never have existed: 1956’s Forbidden
Planet (that sought to intellectualize laser beams and robots with its nod
to Shakespeare’s The Tempest) and
1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
(Stanley Kubrick’s probing, explorative search for human truths in both outer
and inner space).
Unabashedly
optimistic, Close Encounters of the
Third Kind is of this rarefied ilk: a keenly observed demystification of
the mysteries beyond our stratosphere, meant to satisfy – or, at the very
least, ignite – our insatiable thirst for grasping at the infinite and unknown.
In latter day reflections, Spielberg has acknowledged Close Encounters as ‘a young
man’s dalliance with that ‘what if’ fantasy about alien life’. In
retrospect, the movie is even more directly a precursor to Spielberg’s own E.T.; The Extra Terrestrial (1982).
Yet, despite its’ superbly handled optical effects (completed in record time by
Douglas Trumbull and Carlo Rambaldi, with impeccable production design by Joe
Alves – Spielberg’s collaborator on Jaws),
Close Encounters steadily evolves
into a ‘discussion’ piece about humanity’s willingness to embrace its own place
within a community of the cosmos.
In the summer
of ’77, Close Encounters reaped the
whirlwind of the public’s obsession with outer space; at $288 million in
worldwide box office receipts, easily Columbia Pictures most successful movie
of all time to date. Those too quick to dismiss Close Encounters as simply an expression of Spielberg’s own “benign, dreamy-eyed vision” for alien
lifeforms were ignoring its rather transparent Judeo-Christian analogies – or
perhaps, merely setting aside the fact that until Close Encounters, alien creatures in the movies were generally
perceived as life-threatening intergalactic invaders, destined to do us
harm. Far from imbuing his movie with
pie-eyed optimism, Close Encounters
is both Spielberg’s homage to the likes of such turn-of-the-century visionaries
as Jules Verne and Georges Méliès, even as it has since attained the status of
a cultural touchstone on par with its other relevant cinema contemporaries and
made significant contributions to the wellspring of prolific writers like Carl
Sagan and Ray Bradbury.
Like all truly
inspired artistry, Close Encounters
defies any superficial interpretations; its references – either accidental or
intended – leaning toward youthful spirituality, post-Cold War paranoia, and
finally, our collective obsession for otherworldly contact; a premise
foreshadowing Chris Carter’s small screen phenomenon, The X-File (1993-2003).
Spielberg has since gone on record with hindsight as a husband and
father, to say that if he were to remake the picture today, the film’s ‘hero’ – Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss)
would never be allowed to leave his fictional family for the ‘mothership’ from
another world. And yet, it is this penultimate farewell, made after an arduous
quest to make sense of an early ‘brief
encounter’ of the first kind, that truly satisfies: Roy, arguably, never
having belonged to the human world, suffocated in his traditional lower-middle
class suburban existence, suddenly liberated by making the ultimate sacrifice
for mankind. Such parting in ‘sweet
sorrow’ has not lingered in the cinema firmament since Gene Kelly bid Van
Johnson a spooky goodbye at the end of Brigadoon
(1954) to escape into the ether of a mythical highland village with the
raven-haired, 200 year old girl of his dreams – Cyd Charisse.
In its early
stages, Close Encounters seemed
destined either to be made as a documentary, consisting mostly of interviews
with ‘real life’ alien abductees, or just another B-grade sci-fi thriller.
Initially, it was pitched to 2oth Century-Fox. Barring their rejection,
Columbia took up the slack with producers, Julia and Michael Phillips signing
on almost immediately. Spielberg had wisely deduced no ‘legit’ sci-fi movie could be made for under $2.5 million.
Throughout the many permutations that would follow, Close Encounters (under the working title, Project Blue Book) would be pitched to Willard Huyck and Gloria
Katz: its’ premise, of flying saucers landing in West Hollywood, an idea that
Katz particularly abhorred. Mercifully, Spielberg became embroiled with
difficulties and setbacks while making Jaws
(1974), his pipe dream repeated delayed, ostensibly ordained to fail. Kismet
would afford Spielberg the opportunity to do Close Encounters his way; the mega success of Jaws catapulting his
cache in Hollywood into the stratosphere. Meanwhile, in the interim, Spielberg
had also commissioned another draft of the screenplay; this one by Paul
Schrader – deemed unusable and completely thrown out. After another draft by John Hill, heavily
edited, screenwriter, David Giler was brought in, with Spielberg’s friends, Hal
Barwood and Matthew Robbins, adding to the convolution of plots, subplots and
plot twists. U.S. military pilot, Allen Hynek was also hired to legitimize the
more fantastic elements with credible UFO-documented experiences, putting his
own career in the United States Air Force on the line, particularly after USAF
and NASA put pressure on Hynek and the production to cease, vehemently
declining all opportunities to partake in the exercise themselves.
From the
start, Spielberg had endeavored to shoot the entire movie within the confines
of the studio, a particularly impossible request, given the scope of the
project. Eventually, he relented to lens the penultimate ‘contact’ at Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower; an ominous buttress of
craggy, hanging rocks. As production advanced, Spielberg would wind up shooting
apparently everywhere except from a home base; a few interiors in Burbank;
also, inside two abandoned World War II airship hangars at Brookley Air Force
Base in Mobile and Fairhope, Alabama, as well as Louisville and Nashville
Railroad depots in Bay Minette. To simulate the Gobi Desert Spielberg shot in
Dumont Dunes, California. The logistics of pulling off such a feat in record
time caused Spielberg to label Close Encounters as the most unwieldy, arduous
and expensive shoot of his young directorial career. At the height of his exacerbation, Columbia
Pictures, plagued by mounting debts incurred elsewhere in their film-making
empire, balked at the ever-escalating costs incurred on Close Encounters. Original spit-balled by Spielberg at a cost of
$2.7 million, Close Encounters’
budget would eventually balloon to well over $19.4 million. Somewhere in the
middle of all this frenzy, Spielberg also had to contend with firing
co-producer Julia Phillips due to a volatile cocaine addiction. Sometime later,
she would write a fairly scathing tell-all account of this experience, blaming
her ‘problem’ on Spielberg’s perfectionism.
Meanwhile,
Spielberg and his editor, Michael Kahn lamented over the last 25 min. of the
picture; their decisions brought to bear on Ralph McQuarrie and Greg Jein’s
superbly crafted models of ‘the alien mothership’ a magnificent array of metal
and plastic tubes deliberately designed to resemble the apocalyptic landscape
of an inverted oil refinery and lit from within with hundreds of fiber optic
lights. This impressive creation also contained the movie’s singular and deliberate
‘in joke’: an R2-D2 droid clinging to its undercarriage. Under the pressure of time constraints, much
of this final sequence was shot, not by Close
Encounters’ cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond (who had departed on another
project), but John A. Alonzo, László Kovács, and Douglas Slocombe, all of them
brought in to help Spielberg cobble together his finale. Meanwhile, composer,
John Williams toiled on more than 300 five-tone leitmotifs to be used in the
climactic ‘contact’ sequence before Spielberg signed off on the now iconic five
chords. Spielberg had hoped to interpolate a few bars of ‘When You Wish upon a Star’ into this moment, but was ultimately
vetoed the rights to this classic song by the very territorial regime helming
Disney Inc. Undaunted, John Williams ever so slightly altered that classic
song’s signature melody, clearly – if briefly – heard as Roy Neary prepares to
board the mothership. After Close
Encounters’ first preview, Spielberg would trim an additional 7 ½ minutes
from the film to tighten the impact of these final moments. Interestingly,
Williams’ score for Close Encounters lost
the Oscar race to his other monumental contribution of that same year – Star Wars – while nevertheless,
scooping up two Grammys for Best Original Film Score and Best Instrumental
Composition.
Close Encounters opens with a cryptic array of
sightings. In the Sonoran Desert, French scientist, Claude Lacombe (François
Truffaut) and his American interpreter/mapmaker, David Laughlin (Bob Balaban),
along with other government-based scientific researchers discover Flight 19; a
squadron of WWII Grumman TBM Avengers – intact and still operational – presumed
to have vanished into thin air – literally – some thirty years before.
Punctuated by the sound and fury of a raging sandstorm, the moment is fraught
with menacing overtones as an old man claims to have witnessed an event where ‘the sun came out at night, and sang to him.’
Not long thereafter, Lacombe and his team unearth the remains of the S.S.
Cotopaxi; a cargo ship thought to have been lost at sea, now restlessly moored
in the middle of the Gobi Desert. In Indianapolis, air traffic controllers
listen intently as two jumbo jets narrowly avoid a mid-air collision after each
apparently witnesses a UFO. In Muncie, Indiana; an average child, Barry Guiler
(Cary Guffey) is stirred from his slumber when electro-magnetic impulses from
an unseen force cause his battery-operated toys to become animated on their
own. Fascinated, he toddles from his bedroom down to the kitchen, discovering
an unidentified ‘presence’ lurking
near the fridge. Spielberg cleverly delays showing us the alien entity while
feeding into the cliché of ill-omen events yet to follow. But almost
immediately, he diffuses these presumptions by focusing on Barry’s reactions;
an angelic smile as the boy playfully runs out the back porch and into the
rural fields that surround, causing concerned single mother, Jillian (Melinda
Dillon) to chase after him.
In the first
of Close Encounters iconic moments,
Spielberg shifts focus yet again; this time to Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), an
electrical lineman investigating a series of large-scale power outages in the
boondocks of Indiana. Lost on an isolated county road in the middle of the
night, Roy pauses a moment in his utility truck near a railway crossing to pull
out his maps, quite unaware the approaching lights from behind – mimicking the
headlamps of an off road truck - actually belong to an alien spacecraft. In the seconds that follow, Roy experiences a
miraculous electromagnetic storm as the alien craft rises overhead in a
dazzling ceremony of lights; its cast off radiation causing his skin to exhibit
overexposure akin to bad sunburn. As the ship pulls away, power is restored to
Neary’s vehicle. He immediately becomes aware from a cacophony of messages
flooding his CB radio reporting ‘strange lights’ in the sky. Now, Neary races
after his UFO. Nearby, three police cars are in hot pursuit. Along the isolated
and winding highway, bystanders, including Barry and Gillian, have gathered.
Roy narrowly avoids running Barry over; one of the police cruisers driving off
the embankment in its desire to ‘apprehend’ or at least get a better look at
the flying saucers playfully looming overhead.
For Roy, this
moment becomes a watershed; his life’s ambitions completely consumed by the
experience, much to the dismay of his rather impatient and highly skeptical
wife, Ronnie (Terri Garr). As the neighborhood looks on, Roy becomes a
veritable recluse in his home, spending the days in his pajamas, tears up his
living room, carting buckets and wheelbarrows full of wet earth and plant life
to build a replica of Devil’s Tower. Meanwhile, Jillian has begun to experience
visions of the famed natural monument; the walls of her home covered in sketches
of its unique-looking geological formation. Alas, not too long afterward,
Jillian is terrorized by a more intimate alien encounter; the house shaken to
its foundation and Barry kidnapped by these unseen forces. Barry’s abduction is the second seminal moment
in the movie Spielberg calling upon all his creative fortitude to usher in an
utterly spooky sequence, capped off by a frantic Jillian trying in vain to keep
these alien visitors at bay. Once again, Spielberg taps into the ‘authentic self’ of childhood to provide
a signpost to his audience that will do more than signify where this incredibly
heart-palpitating sequence is headed. Unlike Jillian, who is reduced to a near
state of catatonia, paralyzed with fear, Barry elation at seeing these
otherworldly visitors return; even running to greet them while shouting ‘toys’,
wholly unafraid of what lies beyond the menacing orange lights smoldering from
under his front door, affords the audience their twinkling of contemplation.
After all, how could any director allow an unsuspecting child to walk into his
own death?
The middle act
of Close Encounters is its weakest,
which is not to suggest it is without merit. However, after building up the
characters of Roy and Jillian, Spielberg momentarily loses himself in a return
to Lacombe and Laughlin who, along with a rather large contingent of United
Nations UFO ‘experts’, have launched a very aggressive investigation of these
strange supernatural re-occurrences. From witnesses in Dharamsala, India,
Lacombe and Laughlin learn the unidentified spacecraft made a distinctive
five-tone musical phrase as they soared overhead. However, the scientists are
baffled when their reciprocation of this same musical phrased, projected into
outer space, return a meaningless series of numbers (104 44 30 40 36 10) back
to them. With his background in cartography, Laughlin deduces these numeric
signifiers are actually geographical coordinates, pointing to Devils’ Tower
near Moorcroft, Wyoming. Now, Lacombe and a contingent of U.S. military and
scientific personnel converge on the site, planting a false report in the media
of a toxic train wreck forcing the evacuation of local residents.
Inadvertently, the TV broadcast of this bogus news story causes Roy to realize
his compulsion to build Devil’s Tower in his living room – a natural wonder he
has never seen, and therefore knows not why he has become obsessed with it –
results in him making an impromptu pilgrimage, despite the falsified reports of
a devastating toxic nerve gas leak.
While most of
the civilians inexplicably drawn to Devil’s Tower are eventually apprehended by
military patrols, Roy manages a daring escape after being interrogated by
Lacombe and Laughlin. Remembering Jillian from his first evening’s encounter
Roy now takes her along as the two make their way secretly to the footprint of
Devil’s Tower under the cover of a starry night. Creeping along the base of
this imposing natural edifice, the pair discovers a massive communication
outpost set up by the government to make contact with the alien mothership. As
Roy and Jillian look on in awe, a portentous cloud encircles the apex of the
tower; a mind-boggling array of lights emerging to form a spacecraft so titanic
in size it dwarfs virtually everything in its path. Using a large electric
billboard as a musical synthesizer, Lacombe and his scientists are able to form
a very rudimentary bond of communication with the mothership. It eventually
hovers low to the ground, allowing its massive loading bay doors to open and
release over a dozen adults and children from virtually all walks of life:
farmers, soldiers, a little girl in pigtails, the missing pilots from WWII, the
sailors from the Cotopaxi, and even, Barry, who is tearfully reunited with
Jillian. Miraculously, none of these abductees has aged since the hour they
were taken from the earth; some, missing more than fifty years. As a sort of
trading experiment, the government puts forth their own contingent of viable
candidates willing to return to the mothership. Ultimately, only Roy is
selected by an alien mediator. The diminutive and waxen creature communicates
with a smile and primitive hand gestures; Lacombe using Curwen hand signs to
express himself. Roy willingly accepts his lot and boards the mother ship as it
ascends into the galaxy – his future unknown.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is so
patently Spielberg’s struggle to revisit the wonderment, sheer joy and
excitement of his own youthful movie-going experiences; bringing the classical
style of Hollywood’s narrative story-telling into the unlikeliest of genres,
generally not noted for such sustainability. Close Encounters is by far a more richly satisfy and profound than
George Lucas’ intergalactic soap opera, Star Wars (both movies premiered in
this same year).Perhaps, comparisons are unfair, as Spielberg’s movie, if
anything, remains the antithesis of those fantastical spheres in that other
galaxy ‘far, far away’. Collecting
his thoughts and hand picking his cast from an envious roster (including
legendary filmmaker/author, Francois Truffaut), Spielberg ultimately was forced
to cut a few corners to meet Columbia’s deadline for a Christmas release. While
he would lament a few of the technical compromises, Columbia’s gamble
inevitably paid off. Close Encounters
was a colossal financial and critical success. Having pulled the beleaguered
Columbia back from the brink, the studio rewarded Spielberg with the go-ahead
to rethink these visuals three years later and a new re-release of Close Encounters: the Special Edition.
Alterations to
the original movie ranged from excising scenes Spielberg felt had performed
awkwardly the first time around (as example, gone is the sequence where Roy
Neary digs up his entire front yard for raw materials to build his living room
replica of Devil’s Tower), reinstating scenes originally shot in 1977,
inexplicably left on the cutting room floor (the reinstatement of Gobi Desert
sequence; also the moment where Neary rather violently confronts Lacombe and
Laughlin with his psychic compulsion) and finally, the inclusion of brand new
scenes for which cast and crew were reassembled three years later. Spielberg
also endeavored to tighten the tempo of the picture with minor tweaks made
throughout. Unfortunately for Spielberg, Columbia’s ‘free hand’, came with one stipulation. And Spielberg would soon
consider it unforgiveable - the penultimate scene with Roy seen inside the
mothership, observing its cathedral of pulsating lights, moments before the
ship rises majestically into outer space.
Finally, in 2007, Spielberg was given the chance to re-release yet
another version of Close Encounters…for
the third time (and as we all know, 'third time' seems to be the charm for Spielberg) - this time with no strings attached. This third stab remains
Spielberg’s preferred Director’s Cut; basically, excising
the aforementioned sequence, while retaining all the other SFX updates and
edits from the Special Edition. Regardless, in any of its three incarnations, Close Encounters of the Third Kind must
qualify as and out and out of this world masterpiece.
We must
sincerely doff our caps and give immeasurable thanks to Sony Home Entertainment
for possessing both the fortitude and clairvoyance to include all three
versions of Close Encounters of the
Third Kind on their newly released 4K Ultra Hi-Def Blu-Ray. I have seen far
too many ‘revised’ versions of beloved movies make their way to this ‘newest’
format with a complete thoughtlessness in executive logic to exclude ‘original
versions’ from the remastering effort that were already a part of other box set
releases. Cost-cutting for the launch of 4K…bad idea, folks: Warner’s Blade Runner UHD release being a prime
example. For shame! But I digress. Sony’s UHD Blu-Ray is predictably immaculate.
No other major studio has shown a commitment to its back catalog as much as
Sony. We again pay our respects here to
Mr. Grover Crisp, whose custodianship of the old Columbia library is as
commendable as it remains a peerless exemplar all rival studios ought to be
following. Regrettably, none are.
Prepare to be
dazzled, because Close Encounters
has never looked this good on home video. The image is more richly textured and
color fidelity across all three versions included in UHD is exceptional. Flesh
tones appear quite natural. Optical shots retain their slightly degraded visual
characteristic inherent in their indigenous matte and SFX processes. But this
disc manages to refine even these problematic effects shots while subtly
masking their more obvious photographic tricks. Film grain has been retained
with far greater consistency. In projection, this UHD Blu-ray gave me the
distinct pleasure of believing I might actually be watching a Panavision print
master – not a disc. Kudos to Mr. Crisp again – and his talented team for their
quality control in these remastering efforts. ‘Wow’ and sincerest thanks. The
soundtrack on all three versions has been remastered in DTS – no small feat,
considering how few original preservation elements have survived - and using
the best possible source materials for an enigmatic 5.1 mix. This is how an ‘anniversary’ edition of a beloved movie ought to be handled – with attention
paid to every last detail. A real class act!
Extras? Sony
has definitely gone the extra mile here too. We get all three movies on regular
Blu-ray but – get this – not simply the tired ole Blu’s from a decade ago, but
new remasters also derived from these 4K elements. So, gone is the baked in
edge enhancement that was present in the old Blu-ray release, with a marked
improvement in both color fidelity and contrast. Sony has also produced two new
to Blu featurettes for this re-issue: a 22 min. retrospective with Spielberg
and directors J.J. Abrams and Denis Villeneuve, and, a nearly 6 min. compendium
of Spielberg’s home movies and outtakes while making the movie. Unlike Disney
Inc., Sony has elected to port over virtually all of the extras featured on their
old DVD and Blu-ray releases; ergo, it’s a comprehensive package with Laurent
Bouzereau’s exquisite 101 min. documentary front and center, plus Watch the Skies vintage 1977 featurette,
Spielberg’s 30th anniversary ‘look back’, nearly 20 min. of deleted
scenes and over 20 min. of storyboard to film comparisons; a massive photo
gallery, the original trailer and the SE edition trailer.
All of these
goodies are presented in hi-def! No ‘Strange
Days’ slapdash DVD offerings here! For those so inclined, Sony has made Close Encounters available as both the
aforementioned disc only set and a deluxe gift set. The packaging of the gift
set is ‘gimmicky’; a 2-piece lenticular hologram that actually lights up and
plays the iconic ‘five tones’ from the mothership. But the swag doesn’t really
add up to the inflated price tag – especially since you are getting virtually
everything except the booklet and cool packaging from the basic set. Judge and
buy accordingly. Bottom line: very highly recommended! We love Sony at Nix Pix.
We just do. There are many, many reasons why. Close Encounters of the Third Kind in UHD is just one of them. This
is a must own UHD release. We champion it and hope for more of the same.
FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)
5+
VIDEO/AUDIO
5+
EXTRAS
5+
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