Given the cynicism and ugliness of the recent box-office hits The Hitman’s Bodyguard, Annabelle: Creation, and Wind River, the current rerelease of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) feels like a welcome breath of fresh air. Justly celebrated for its warmth and sincerity, Close Encounters shames most contemporary blockbusters for their lack of heart and imagination. The film envisions human contact with extraterrestrial life as a celebratory event; the characters’ efforts to understand the strange life-forms—through scientific inquiry, culture, and curiosity—represent the best of humankind. Close Encounters also reflects a globalist optimism, showing people from different countries working together to figure out how they might communicate with the alien visitors.
Yet Neary’s breakdown gives the film its uncanny power. Spielberg introduces the character as a model husband and father who provides his kids room to play and shows enthusiasm over the prospect of taking them to see Pinocchio. His obsession with the lights in the sky and with constructing strange objects (based on a vision communicated to him by the extraterrestrials) seems to revert him to childhood, ignoring his wife and kids’ protestations and engaging in his pursuits with single-minded intensity. His family walks out on him because of his behavior, leaving him free to drive to Wyoming, where he believes he’ll find the structure he’s worked so hard to re-create. Neary’s westward journey and his ultimate discovery of the aliens accounts for the thrilling third act, but the memory of the family’s disintegration hangs over these passages. Neary might undergo a fantastic adventure, but one can never forget that he’s doing it alone.
