Movie Review - Close Encounters

Today is "Close Encounters"

Close Encounters of the First Kind (Dark Desert Highway With A Big Stupid Light)

This UFO Drama unfolds immediately with bizarre occurrences. First we have Mr. French guy going out to a Mexican desert out in the middle of nowhere to investigate a UFO sighting. Nobody knows why the French guy is there, he seems to have utterly no purpose in the movie other than to speak French and to show a set of hand signals that will be used later on in the movie. Then we see another guy, who is just as irritating as the French guy, who was hired to, you guessed it, to translate what the French guy says. Formally he had studied maps. So there these two characters hang in history as being the most useless team of investigators for UFO sightings.

But the comedy doesn't stop there…oh no…next thing you know, there are B-52 Bombers that went missing back during WWII and ended up in this stupid Mexican desert out in the middle of nowhere.


(Aliens)

"Hey Bob, let's get rid of these airplanes."
"Okay."
"Let's drop them off in Mexico. No Border Patrol there."
"Okay…but we gotta put them way out there where nobody will find them."
"Sure thing, but while we're dropping these off let's make a lot of noise and pretend to be a heliocentric singing monstrosity."
"Okay. Will do."

(Earthlings)

"Why are these planes here?"
"Beats the shit outta me."
"Mon Dieu!"
"That guy over there says the sun came out last night and sang to him."
"Merde!"

Close Encounters of the Second Kind (Let's Mess with the Lights, Railroads and Mongolians)

After realizing that Mexico would probably be severely guarded by every force known to humankind, the UFOs seem to have left the area! But hey, there's this quaint little town or two in Indiana, so naturally a few blackouts wouldn't be that obvious. Nah, why stop at a few blackouts? Take out the whole freakin' town! Wizz by an airplane or two, shake up those railroad crossings that are so annoying and check everyone's mailbox and then beat the crap out of them. Shine bright lights, take pictures, use the 1000x bright flashes for this purpose. Destroy someone's ice-box, put all the food in the floor! Make note; come back later to kidnap little boy.

(Aliens)

"Hey this stupid boat is taking up way too much room, let's get rid of it!"
"Yeah we should learn the art of abducting humans without taking their stupid monstrosities with them."
"I've been working on a plan. We could use a vacuum-sucking type thing to abduct earth peeps. We'll test it on that little boy when we abduct him."
"Okay. So where are we dropping off this boat?"
"I've got it! How about the Gobi Desert in Mongolia! Nobody ever goes there, even when the weather's good."
"That's a brilliant plan!"

(Earthlings)

"We've been getting all this radar. It's in numbers and two sets of three numbers each."
"Hey this set of numbers sounds like that song they were singing in India when they reported UFOs."
"Hey before I was hired to speak French, I used to read maps. This first number is a longitude. They're not co-ordinates for the sky, this is Earth-based."
"We're popular with the aliens. We rock. They wanna probe us."

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Devil's Tower as a Filler For Lack of a Script)

Nevermind that the alien technology is never even touched upon in this movie, but none of the reasons for what they're doing even comes into play, or question, or speculation. It's as if everything is so completely accepted that even the government is playing right along. In real life this wouldn't be the case. The government would try to kill or exploit anything coming within even the slightest layer of the stratosphere after all these strange encounters that have left major evidence of its advanced technology.

Leaving all these ancient relics belonging to the government in all these foreign countries, that if you were the United States government, you'd probably take that as an insult. Their planes in Mexico. Their ships in Mongolia. I mean what is the message here? But you needn't worry about the government being insulted in this flick, because this script will insult your intelligence on almost every level! It isn't just the way they wave extraterrestrial life in your face as if to say that aliens are entertaining by being the most ridiculous of all life-forms in the galaxy, it's the way they put together Earthling characters that are so detestable, that you want the aliens to kill them! A man whose wife is unrealistically close-minded, is too distracted by shiny objects. A head of some Army unit putting the Vulcan neck-pinch on cattle and other God's creatures to clear the area around Devil's Tower National Monument and still, there's the French guy.

(Aliens)

"The vacuum suck-a abduct-a worked! We got the kid!"
"Hooray. He smells."
"Now what?"
"Hey that song, that's our new space theme…let's put it to a video!"
"Hey wow…where do we film the video?"
"How about that Devil's Tower?"
"Oh but that's on Earth! We'd never be able to get a video filmed there!"
"Sure we can, we'll drop off all these abducted Earthlings and we'll be famous!"
"We should land, scare the hell out of the Earthlings, come out of the ship and say 'You're in BIG TROUBLE!'"
"Nah, we're just there to entertain, do a concert, not set them straight."

(Earthlings)

"Look it's Devil's Tower."
"That's pretty."
"Okay, let's go."

Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (We Are the Universe, We Sing Songs, We're Nice, Non-Violent, Stupid)

So, after realizing that nobody's going to act like real people in this movie (except for maybe Richard Dreyfus) you begin to not mind so much the inconsistencies and that many years later the scene where the little boy is abducted (wherein aliens try to find a way into the house through locked doors, shut windows, fireplace chimneys, and vents) is used to better effect in Mel Gibson's movie 'Signs'…and that movie isn't all that great on explaining alien presence either!

The UFOs do a great deal of damage when coming into contact with minor earth-based items, such as houses, mailboxes, etc. but amazingly when their outdoor concert is in full swing, and they're flying at random all over the place, nothing or no one seems to be pelted into oblivion! Only a mere glass window breaks, but that's because the UFO farted. In musical tones, of course.

The aliens aren't acting like aliens either! You really, truly want them to kill somebody. You look forward to it. But it never happens. Then after they show themselves to be kinda wishy-washy, you want the government to take out a few of the aliens! Either way you're reduced to tears as the sweet return of the little boy to his mother pulls on all your heart-strings. Then you cry for yourself because nobody is gonna be put out of their (or your) misery!

They fly back off into outer-space like a gigantic floating elf village full of candy and happy, happy thoughts! Where are the Men in Black when you need them?

This has been my Multiple Movie Review of just One Movie!