Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg

It seems we are teaching ourselves to be terrified of incursions from another world.

The slasher-in-space sub-genre is now so much a part of the mainstream that we are subjected to copycat ventures such as March’s Jake Gyllenhaal flop Life. It is no shock that the most enduring “serious” space saga is Alien, with its terrifying multi-jawed, acid-blooded monstrosities. The pervading, populist cloak of suspicion that envelops the world has fed into our science fiction cinema, too. It is not hard to imagine the outcome if a real mothership landed on US soil today: Trump might well be on Twitter, threatening to nuke it to kingdom come, before our enlightened new friends got to the second part of John Williams’ famous five-note refrain. Ultimately, nobody brings any guns to the ray-gun party. The movie’s early scenes may establish that our visitors’ arrival has the power to terrify those who are not tuned in to their wavelength, but by the time we get to meet them, there is little sense of threat. The aliens themselves are benevolent, celestial beings who only want to learn more about us, test out our ability to understand basic chord progressions, and so forth. In Close Encounters, the US army’s reaction to the threat of alien invasion is limited to marking out a site where it is believed the extra-terrestrial mothership might choose to make first contact. Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.Were attitudes so very different 40 years ago, when Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind first touched down in cinemas? Watching the film in today’s political climate of fear and distrust in one’s fellow man – let alone technologically superior beings from the cosmos – it is impossible not to note the glorious naivety of the picture.

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Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg