Review: E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982)

It received a standing ovation at Cannes. It brought Princess Diana and Ronald and Nancy Reagan to tears. It made a star of seven-year-old Drew Barrymore, raked in the most box office revenue of any movie made up to that time (and more than any movie made in the '80s), made us realize that ugly space turds could be lovable and peaceful, spawned a swarm of lesser copycats and even Richard Attenborough, the director of Gandhi, the film that beat it to Best Picture at the Academy Awards, conceded that it was robbed. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, underneath all the hype and even its apparent "saccharine" nature that in some ways has tainted its reputation, is still a film that can reduce grown men to blubbering messes by the time the end credits begin to roll, and that can still enchant viewers young and old as much as it did in 1982.
Working from a story he had nurtured since childhood and that evolved into a wonderful screenplay by Melissa Mathison, Spielberg – in following the adventures of Elliott (Henry Thomas), a lonely 10-year-old boy from a single-parent family who is befriended by an alien botanist left behind on Earth by accident by his people – offers a knockout directorial effort that is by far one of his best. By cleverly choosing to shoot the film chronologicically he coaxes wonderful performances from all his cast, both the kids and the adults (Thomas drew on the memory of the day his dog died in order to achieve the emotion he needed to evoke on the last day of filming). More importantly for a fantasy film, he marriages all the post-production elements seamlessly: Allen Daviau's cinematography in the bike flight sequences provides the viewer with an adrenaline rush that has rarely been matched before or since in cinema, the visual effects (albeit largely due to the touch-ups that occurred for the film's 20th anniversary re-release in 2002), don't show 27 years, and John Williams' towering score ought to be compared to works by any classical composer.
Its huge success made it a worldwide phenomenon in its time and its fanbase just keep growing in numbers, and rightfully so. However, despite its enviable performance at the box office, and the considerable amount of praise that critics and audiences continue to heap on it, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial also remains one of the most widely misunderstood of all films. Frequently still written off by some as just a standard piece of frothy, cutesy juvenile drivel, this is actually far darker film than it initially seems. In the true fashion of most of the blockbusters he's helmed, here Spielberg makes you look underneath all the wondrous fantasy aspects of the story to uncover its true thematic power and importance. E.T. actually offers depictions of nuclear family break-ups, loneliness, isolation, humans testing on non-human species, and tolerance, and some have even claimed E.T. is a Christ allegory (which Spielberg vehemently denies.) Once the viewer discovers these deeply-buried thematic elements of the story, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial becomes much more than the sum of its parts.
Although Spielberg considers this to be the epitome of all his work as a director, I very slightly prefer Schindler's List and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but this has a fair claim to be the very last word in family film-making. It's a film that I can watch whenever I'm need of inspiration, and time has done nothing to diminish its wonder. Who would've thought that an ugly space turd could work his magic on successive generations like that, even after nearly 30 years?