Since I was ill last week and one can only sleep so much, I cleared out this one from the DVR’s collection of TCM’s Oscar movies. I can’t even remember what the heck it won, wait…checked imdb.com, Best Cinematography and a bunch of other nominations in 1978. I wanted to see this again because I hadn’t watched it in over 20 years, back when HBO was probably showing it to death.
I’m not going to go over the plot because everyone knows what happens as most of the movie’s key scenes were absorbed into America’s cultural vocabulary. It was a suspenseful film in its day though. When the story begins, the aliens are mysterious and puzzling since you have no idea what they have to do with WWII-era planes that went missing in the Bermuda Triangle. Then they’re rather mischievous when Dreyfeuss encounters them messing with the power grid in eastern Indiana. They become rather frightening as they abduct Dillon’s son in a scene reminiscent of Martian curiosity from both film versions of War of the Worlds. It all concludes with a successful cultural exchange between humans and aliens with everybody who they “kidnapped” being released. Pretty revolutionary stuff as most people were accustomed to UFOs and aliens coming to Earth to conquer it in the Fifties and Sixties. It became a short-lived trend thanks to Fox giving us Independence Day in 1996 to re-ignite xenophobia.
Does Encounters still work today? Overall I think it does but Spielberg couldn’t make this movie now, even with his current list of successes. I fear that it would be either shortened to keep contemporary audiences from being bored or it would be padded with car chases, explosions and noise. Today’s movie goers have become too savvy or inattentive when it comes to those slow parts which may or may not be critical to the plot, more often “not” in the Seventies. Besides the excellent story and execution, Encounters is another interesting time capsule about the world I remember growing up in being indirectly responsible for the plot’s flow: no cell phones, no personal computers with Internet access and no CNN just the old Big Three networks for news. I don’t think many people would consider the Federal government and Army competent enough to succeed in arranging nor having a peaceful interaction with the Aliens after fumbling something easier like Hurricane Katrina. After Watergate and Vietnam, most were suspicious and cynical but they were certain of the Feds’ capabilities.