Thirty years after this imaginative and awe-inspiring epic wowed audiences in theaters, Steven Spielberg's globe-spanning tale of humanity's first direct contact with extraterrestrials, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, arrives home in an unprecedented box set collection of all three versions of the film, now available together for the first time.

This 30th Anniversary Ultimate Edition combines Spielberg's original Theatrical Release cut from 1977 never before released in a home entertainment format, plus his 1980 revised Special Edition with additional scenes including a new ending inside the Mothership, and now topped off with the Director's Cut — Spielberg's final re-edited version which most closely matches his originally intended vision.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND remains a powerful cinematic and cultural milestone after three decades, and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has finally given this masterpiece its due in a three-disc standard DVD box set and a two-disc box set exclusively in high definition Blu-Ray format. Since this is the first of director Steven Spielberg's films to be released on a high-definition disc, FilmEdge.net now offers its review of this landmark film in both formats to completely document this stargazing classic of modern American culture and mythology.

As it first appeared in theaters late in 1977, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS immediately grabbed audiences' imagination and critical praise, even though it opened only in a limited two-city engagement before widening to theaters across the country.  Spielberg's story of unidentified flying objects visiting Earth and opening communication with an alien civilization was told on an ambitious grand scale, yet the heart of the tale focused on the individual human experiences of its main characters for a strong dramatic experience as the visually dazzling plot unfolded.

STORY SUMMARY:

As an international science team lead by Dr. Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut) investigates a string of baffling UFO-related artifacts found around the globe, two average American families are changed forever by their encounters with UFO phenomenon.  Electrical lineman Roy Neary (played to neurotic perfection by Richard Dreyfuss) is barnstormed by a spacecraft on a lonely Illinois road one night in a storm of light and telepathic communication.  The same night Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon in her Oscar-nominated performance) awakens to find her little boy Barry (Cary Guffey) has run off into the woods to follow the extraterrestrial visitors out of their house.  As Jillian searches for her runaway son, the trio converge on the same hilltop road only to witness the UFO's appearance undeniably up close and personal.

Roy and Jillian demonstrate growing fixations on a mental image they share of a towering mountain, an alien message which both feel compelled to decode for hidden meaning.  Their encounters becomes life-altering turning points in both families: Roy withdraws from his fatherly role to pursue some understanding of this irrational event, nightly visiting the same hilltop in hopes of spying the alien ships again; meanwhile a very frightening and unwanted return by the aliens ends with Barry's abduction right out of his mother's arms.   Roy's blinding obsession drives his wife (Teri Garr) and three children away as their marriage disintegrates, while Jillian engages in her own desperate quest to find her lost child.

When Lacombe's investigative team deciphers the alien clue pinpointing their landing coordinates at Devil's Tower in Wyoming, both Roy and Jillian finally solve their obsessive puzzle in news reports covering up the government's rendezvous plan, and the two reunite to answer the implanted invitation to the aliens' arrival on Earth.  The ensuing finale is a wondrous, operatic light show of dazzling special effects and stirring music amid a transcendent dramatic scene of confirmation and personal redemption for both Roy and Jillian.  More importantly, Spielberg's tale about communication with other cultures opening the doorway to understanding and peaceful co-existence remains highly relevant today.

WE ARE NOT ALONE — THE FIRST ENCOUNTER, 1977

ORIGINAL THEATRICAL CUT REVIEW:

This 30th Anniversary Ultimate Edition collection is the first chance fans have to own this original Theatrical Release cut on DVD — while a 'super-hybrid' edit of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS often appeared on network television, the strictly theatrical cut was never sold on home video, as Spielberg's 1980 Special Edition was the first ever available on VHS.  Thus the restoration of this Theatrical Release finally completes a lengthy quest for devotees of the film, and it reveals some important changes in both content and context when compared to the two subsequent edits.

The most significant effect of this version is that the film spends much less time with the Neary family, focusing more narrowly on Roy's individual encounter with the UFO and the costs of his psychological obsession paid by himself and his family.  With the lack of more intimate insights into Roy and Ronnie's marriage and the strains it endures, this cut de-emphasizes the loss of what Roy leaves behind to pursue his otherworldly destiny, more evenly equating his experience (and screen time) with Jillian and presenting something closer to an ensemble story rather than emphasizing Roy's personal journey.

Several shorter scenes are found only in the Theatrical Release as well, primarily the power station scene in which Roy responds to an emergency call-in by his plant bosses to investigate electrical outages in the area.  This power station scene, while one of my personal favorite moments that I'm glad to see arrive on DVD finally, also illustrates an important facet of Roy's character never punctuated in the other two editions.  Roy Neary is assigned the job to investigate downed power lines in the middle of the night solely because of his personal knowledge of the affected area.  His supervisors argue about his seniority, but in the end he's handed the job because he's the best qualified man on-hand to do it — just like his UFO encounter later that night, he's chosen because he's there to be chosen.

The Special Edition and Director's Cut jump from Roy getting a call from his boss about power outages directly to Roy driving through the night to solve the problem.  The deletion of the power station scene makes Roy appear to take action directly on his own volition, which contradicts Ronnie's revelation that Roy can't drive at night because he gets lost too easily.  This character flaw is played out later when he gets lost at the train crossing and has his fateful UFO encounter.  I much prefer the inclusion of the power station scene, both for its implied sense of how the UFO phenomenon is spreading across the state and how it informs Roy as a reluctant but responsive protagonist in his unfolding journey into the unknown.

THERE IS MORE — THE SECOND ENCOUNTER, 1980

SPECIAL EDITION REVIEW:

Since financial pressures at Columbia Pictures forced Spielberg to hastily wrap and release CLOSE ENCOUNTERS late in 1977, much earlier than he wanted, the director always felt a nagging dissatisfaction with the film despite its critical and audience success.  As he admits in the new Bonus Feature documentary, the push for an early theatrical release prevented Spielberg from trimming scenes and perfecting some visual effects shots he felt were required in his preferred final cut.

When Spielberg approached Columbia about revising the film to his liking, the studio would agree only on one condition: one of the new scenes he shot had to take audiences where they hadn't been before — inside the Mothership with Roy Neary.  Columbia Pictures refused to fund the changes unless Spielberg gave them new material upon which they could base their marketing campaign as a draw for new and returning audiences.  Spielberg gladly agreed in order to finalize CLOSE ENCOUNTERS as he felt it should be seen, and he designed the new, expanded finale to take viewers onboard the glistening spaceship.

Spielberg re-hired actors J. Patrick McNamara as the government team's Project Leader and Bob Balaban as Lacombe's interpreter David Laughlin, sent to find the derelict freighter ship Cotopaxi, inexplicably stranded in the middle of the Gobi desert.  While this scene was ingeniously shot using a highly detailed ship model and forced perspective camera work, in the end this new revelation of alien's returning lost vessels adds little new to the story since it basically repeats the Flight 19 squadron discovery in Mexico which opens the film.  The new scene certainly broadens the global scope of the aliens' contact on Earth, and implies that some spacecraft big enough to take and return a freighter is involved, but the sequence doesn't advance the story much beyond adding one more visual 'wow' moment to an already stunning film.

As noted above, the main and most important variation presented in the Special Edition is how Spielberg restored and expanded several scenes about the Neary family.  Roy is now introduced attempting to teach his son Brad his math fractions by staging a model train wreck in the family's den.  A glimpse into underlying marital tension plays out as Ronnie reminds Roy about his promise to take the family out, and a debate ensues whether to see Pinocchio or go miniature golfing.  These prolonged, more intimate looks at the Neary family dynamic emphasize Roy's lingering childish attitudes, both positive and negative, which eventually feed into his obsession over the UFO encounters.  The loud, emotionally painful fight between he and Ronnie illustrate his lack of responsibility as both a parent and husband, creating a tear in the family fabric which he's unable and unwilling to mend. 

Like Spielberg's quasi-sequel in spirit, E.T. THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL, these dramatic changes to the Special Edition reflect much more of the director's feelings and experiences during his own parents' divorce as a child.  These re-edited and restored family conflicts certainly let Teri Garr shine in her role as Ronnie and deepen Dreyfuss' character too, but structurally these changes also put Roy Neary much more at the center of the story.  In the original Theatrical Cut, Roy's story was much more balanced by Jillian's frightful tale of her son's abduction; but in this 1980 revision, viewers spend much more time getting to know Roy in all his foibles as a man, not just a lead protagonist.  Roy Neary is seen as less mentally imbalanced and more sympathetically flawed, which perhaps makes his eventual destiny more identifiable to audiences — and apparently more palatable to a maturing filmmaker three years later.

The final revelation as Roy walks into the Mothership feels and looks tacked on, as it was by studio demand.  Spielberg never addressed it until two decades later, but in this DVD collection he admits that taking audiences inside the Mothership was a mistake, a "deal made with the devil" in order to get financing for his re-cutting of the film.  The main problem: fans and audiences who saw CLOSE ENCOUNTERS in 1977 and 1978 had years to imagine and wonder about what Roy found inside the alien spaceship.  Too much time had passed and no revised scene could possibly awe, much less satisfy, what fantasies viewers had already imagined for themselves.  The Special Edition extension, while a noble attempt, couldn't help but be a let down and it interrupted one of the most emotionally perfected finales in all cinema.

Alas, the Special Edition was the first and only version of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS available on home video and remained that way for years until the advent and popularity of the DVD format.  Aside from the "super-hybrid" cut which ran yearly on network television, the Special Edition was the cut viewers saw most and owned in their home collections, with scenes deleted from the Theatrical Cut like the power station disappearing from view until now.

A VIEW FROM ABOVE — THE THIRD ENCOUNTER, 1998

DIRECTOR'S CUT REVIEW:

I'll begin with clarification of terms: in 1998, Columbia/Sony released what was called the Collector's Edition of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS on home video in conjunction with a brief theatrical run in limited markets.  This Collector's Edition was subsequently released on DVD in 2001 - 2002.  But for the purposes of this new Sony box set release, I'll refer to this, Spielberg's third and final edition of the film as the Director's Cut — not to be confused with Sony's packaging of all three versions as the 30th Anniversary Ultimate Edition!

Steven Spielberg vows he will spare audiences future confusion by promising this is utterly his last and closest vision of the film he always intended to give audiences since 1977.  Indeed, while seemingly edited down to tighten the story, his Director's Cut actually has the longest running time of all three versions, clocking in at 137 minutes (with the Theatrical Cut running 135 and the Special Edition a short 132 minutes).

Basically his Director's Cut includes all the best moments from the first two editions, and eliminates the expanded finale scene with Roy inside the Mothership — an addition Spielberg now regrets ever filming.  As stated frankly in the new documentary, Spielberg confides that the Mothership interior should have remained "the exclusive property of the audience's imagination." 

Surprisingly there are only four other changes in the Director's Cut: two additional shots added for the Special Edition (a UFO lighting up a McDonald's billboard and the UFO conference applauding Lacombe's musical codebreaking) have been removed; and two short sequences (reporters confronting a military spokesman and Roy's clay sculpting of the mountain) were restored to their original length from the Theatrical Cut. 

Yet this most recent version by Spielberg looks and feels the most complete, retaining the extended Neary family scenes from the Special Edition, and omitting the power station scene as the significant plot deviations from the 1977 edition.  With the film's original ending and finale score by John Williams restored, this Director's Cut of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS does feel right again, both in emotional pacing and dramatic momentum.

30th ANNIVERSARY ULTIMATE EDITION BONUS FEATURES — 2007

3-DISC DVD BOX SET:

The standard DVD box set collection contains a solid batch of extras, though only the new interview Steven Spielberg: 30 Years of Close Encounters was created for this year's release.  Still it makes a strong addition to any fan's library, as the writer/director reflects on the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS era of his then-fledgling career and remarks how this film, more than all the others, dates him in his youth.  Pay close attention to Speilberg's remarks as a father of seven and what that means in his life, and you'll understand why his attitudes toward Roy Neary's actions influenced the Director's Cut content.  In this interview, Spielberg also speaks more candidly about the "mistake" he made filming scenes inside the Mothership, and his thoughts on why the film wasn't even more successful at the box office.

DVD viewers will also enjoy the Making of Close Encounters documentary, which was originally released on the Collector's Edition DVD release a few years ago, as evidenced by all of Spielberg's segments being shot on location for SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.  If fans don't already own it, this will be a new bonus to them and I strongly suggest watching this Making Of featurette before viewing the 30 Years interview just to preserve the timeline and continuity of Spielberg's comments.  While slightly dated, this documentary holds great value due to the recent interviews with much of the film's cast including Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban and "little" Cary Guffey, now a grown man.  Their recollections and reflections on the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS  experience are a valuable and entertaining glimpse into the trials and triumphs of that most difficult of productions.  Unfortunately, or rather inconveniently, this otherwise excellent documentary is split into pieces across all three discs so it's impossible to watch straight through as intended.   You lose nothing of the content, it's just a hassle to get into the discussion only to have to get up and switch discs then re-menu to resume the conversation.

The original Sony press releases and early product descriptions claimed that only Blu-Ray sets would contain the original 1977 Watch the Skies featurette, but fear not — DVD viewers can enjoy this retro look at this CLOSE ENCOUNTERS publicity reel which looks downright alien by today's standards.  Nevertheless, its vintage qualities and style make a fun contribution to the 30th Anniversary concept and will delight cinemaphiles who hold special fondness for 1970s moviemaking.

Each edition disc also offers its own original preview trailers, and the box set includes a Scrapbook featuring popular and rare behind-the-scenes photos of the cast and crew with mini-biographies for all the principals.  Topping off the DVD set is a folded insert poster, featuring the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS one-sheet design on one side and A View From Above diagram on the reverse, which compares the edits and differences in scenes between all three versions of the film along a timeline.  Call-out boxes and photos detail cut, extended or re-arranged scenes as they happen along the film's running time chart in a very handy graphical way to understand and spot editing changes all at once or while watching any given version of the film

This standard DVD remastering of a 30-year old film displayed remarkably well via an upscaling DVD player, and the DTS 5.1 audio track made full, clear use of the surround sound field better than most remastered DVD releases of the era.  You'll be hard pressed to find many deficiencies in the DVD version of this classic.

2-DISC BLU-RAY BOX SET:

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND is the first of director Steven Spielberg's films to be released in a high-definition disc format, naturally appearing exclusively on Sony's Blu-Ray format.  The most significant difference in this Blu-Ray box set is that it includes the same content as above but on only two discs, putting all three versions of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS on one 50GB disc thanks to the advanced process of seamless branching. Basically all the scene variations exist on the disc and when viewers select which film edition to watch, the Blu-Ray player then compiles the correct scenes in the right order and length to present that edit.  This technology lived up to the term seamless, as no delays were evident as all three cuts were played in their entirety— just one of the reasons it's taken me a while to review CLOSE ENCOUNTERS on both DVD and Blu-Ray, as I've watched the film at least six times across both formats!  The branching is invisible to viewers, as it should be, but its effects keep this box set compact on two convenient discs.

The 1080p Blu-Ray image and sound processing also played flawlessly on my Panasonic DMP-BD30, despite the film's age in terms of visual effects and Vilmos Zsigmond's low-light cinematography.  Kudos to Sony's high-definition remastering of the widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio print transfers, and to Douglas Trumbull for shooting the special effects in 65mm before combining in the final print which reduced the graininess of the glowing UFOs and preserved the pinpoint starlight in the night skies well.  The DTS HD 5.1 and Dolby TrueHD 5.1 soundtrack took good advantage of the surround sound field, retaining crisp, clear high end signals and distinct center-channel dialogue, while delivering undistorted rumbling bass during thunderstorms and towering Mothership's arrival.  John Williams' masterpiece of film scoring sounds clean and vibrant with screaming highs during Barry's abduction, and emoting the spirituality of his massive finale suite of score cues.

Blu-Ray's 50GB disc storage capacity allows another standout high-definition feature: the seamless branching of three versions on one disc allows an on-screen experience of the A View From Above mapping of film version changes.  Activate this setting at the main menu and whichever version of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS you choose, on-screen icons will mark scenes which differ from the other two edits of the film, along with photos and text briefly explaining the change.  It's a movie geek bonus to be sure, but also an easy tool for casual viewers who want to learn more about this film's cross-decade evolution at the hands of its director.  The paper poster is also included with the box set for your analog viewing pleasure.

Additional bonus features appear exclusively on the Blu-Ray set (though most are presented in standard def), including: nine deleted scenes, many presented in raw, unedited dailies form; a storyboard-to-scene comparison, matching five scenes from the film with their pre-production shot development sketches; an extensive photo gallery covering all aspects of production, from Ralph McQuarrie's first designs of the Mothership through location scouting, more storyboard stills, behind-the-scenes and crew pictures, cast portraits and marketing campaign images from the 1977 and 1980 release campaigns; and all three film versions' promotional trailers.

REVIEW SUMMARY:

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND is a modern classic of American filmmaking created by the most commercially successful director of our time, and this multi-disc home entertainment release is an indispensable addition to any film fan's disc collection. This story of our first contact with an alien civilization retains all the suspense, wonder and cinematic awe it first offered three decades ago, and all of these qualities are only enhanced in Sony's thorough and thoughtfully produced DVD and Blu-Ray disc sets.  The respectful treatment given to Steven Spielberg's enduring epic assures that CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND will continue entertaining audience for a new generation and inspiring viewers to look up at the stars with hope that we are not alone.