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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 4/18/2026

The Blank Check Film

Every few years, a studio decides to make a large bet on a younger filmmaker. A weirdly large budget to a filmmaker who had proven their worth in some large way. Think Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate or, more recently, Damien Chazelle's Babylon. Or, if you want, every movie Christopher Nolan has made since The Dark Knight.

The ones that interest me most are the weird ones. Think Richard Kelly's Southland Tales (though...is it a blank check movie? It was only made for $17 million), weird movies with way too much ambition and suddenly a lot of money to pursue it from filmmakers who've never worked at that level and probably have no right to suddenly command those budgets.

Which is to say that I showed Junior Close Encounters of the Third Kind a couple of weeks ago.

Beginnings

"Wait...TJM," you say. "Close Encounters isn't that weird of a movie. It's pretty standard Steven Spielberg, right? It's got his filmmaking touches and embrace of the everyman. It's just as much a Spielberg movie as Jurassic Park or Empire of the Sun or Raiders of the Lost Ark, right?"

No, no it is not. It is actually extremely different. And to get to that we have to talk briefly about the pre-production history.

Spielberg had wanted to make a movie about UFOs since his youth, making a film (now lost) called Firelight that seemingly served as some kind of prototype to what Close Encounters would become (there are reports that entire sequences were lifted from Firelight). After Spielberg made the jump from TV movies to the silver screen, he entered an agreement with Columbia Pictures to make that movie. He hired Paul Schrader, the writer of Taxi Driver and raised in a Calvinist household, to write the first draft.

Spielberg hated that draft, though. You can find it online, and it's not a good screenplay. Importantly, though, it provided what I see as the backbone to the whole final product.

Schrader's screenplay was about an Air Force lieutenant named Paul Van Owen who was tasked with going around to people who saw UFOs and convincing them that they weren't real. Then, he discovers that UFOs are real when he's hit by a blinding light on the road back to his hotel, and he spends the next couple of decades trying to find the proof of them. Does this sound like something...familiar? Well, it should. It's the story of Saul becoming Paul the Evangelist. It's a religious story.

And despite Spielberg's hatred of the original script, the rewrites he commissioned from other writers, and his own rewrites (Spielberg is the only credited writer on the final film), that underlying reality of a man on a religious search for truth remains. And that's where the weirdness of the movie begins.

Family Man


One of the major changes that Spielberg insisted on was changing Paul to Roy Neary. Paul was the military man with a family. Roy is the electrician early in his career with a wife and three children. That change to the everyman was important to Spielberg, and it brought the overall project within Spielberg's more familiar milieu. However, when Spielberg kept the undergirding idea of Neary abandoning his family in pursuit of the truth.

He is the sole breadwinner, working as an electrician in the early part of his career for the Indiana utilities industry. He supports his wife, Ronnie (played by Teri Garr), and three children when he's hit by that light in the night on the road to somewhere he can't find. His obsession steadily overtakes him in small forms (making a mountain out of shaving cream in his palm) until he simply cannot see why Ronnie would object to him tearing up their plants, throwing dirt through their kitchen window, and building an 8 foot tall replica of Devil's Tower in their living room.

And then, when he makes the connection between his sculpture and the real Devil's Tower...there's no more thought for his family at all.

I was reminded of a story I've heard about a medieval woman, a mother, who stepped over her own child in order to enter a convent. What Roy Neary does is a religious move. It's casting aside everything about this world in order to pursue something higher. Can it just be he's really into aliens all of a sudden? It can be, but the obvious religious undertones of the film is what pushes Roy from crank into believer, I think. And that's a marked contrast to pretty much the rest of Spielberg's filmography.

From Indiana Jones decided to take his father's hand instead of trying for the Holy Grail at the end of The Last Crusade to Dr. Alan Grant learning to appreciate the value of children in Jurassic Park to Ray Ferrier trying to protect his children in the face of an alien invasion in War of the Worlds, Spielberg's everyman heroes choose family over the strange, weird sights that they see, but not in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. For years, Spielberg has noted this contrast and insisted that he's uncomfortable with it, especially after he started his own family with Kate Capshaw.

This inversion of the typical family man, coming near the start of Spielberg's career no less (even Jaws had Chief Brody returning home after facing the terrible horror of nature on the seas), is one of those things about the movie that fascinates me in no small part because Roy Neary should be deeply unlikeable.

Wonder and Awe


Way back when, one of my first dozen or so posts was about awe in film. I mostly contrasted Avatar which seemingly had the elements to make something wonderous, and The Tree of Life, a film that really does hit me rather hard in its creation of the cosmos sequence. I outlined three elements that I think are necessary for a film to create awe in an audience. They were scale (things have to be big), difference (they have to be not typical things), and they have to have a veiled meaning. Avatar succeeded in the first but failed in the second and third. The Tree of Life succeeded in all three.

Close Encounters succeeds at all three, I think, and it's vital to the story, particularly to Roy as a character. Roy leaving his family because of flashing lights in the sky isn't enough. He needs a huge incentive to leave, and this is where the wonder and awe of the aliens works. How does Spielberg actually accomplish it?

Well, it's those three elements. Firstly, the idea of alien life and outer space is big on its own, but we also have the actual mothership that appears at the ending, which is huge. Scale? Check. What about difference. This is where the use of the five-tone musical cue (a tone, go up a tone, drop a major third, drop an octave, go up a perfect fifth) is important. Music is emotional on the surface with mathematical underpinings. It is a new way of thinking for most people and eschews literal translation. So, different? Check. Finally, the five tone cue could literally just mean hello (five letters, five tones), but Spielberg never explicates that. It sidesteps literal translation in favor of a more purely emotional form of communication. Combine that with the scale and difference of it all, and you've got the makings of wonder and awe.

And when Roy Neary makes it to the other side of Devil's Tower and witnesses the arrival of the alien mothership...it hits me. It all makes sense. The quest for the wondrous feels justified, even, because what Roy finds something so great, so much bigger than himself, and something so potentially meaningful that casting his family aside seems to just...be fine.

How weird is that? How many films not only try to do that but succeed at it fully?

Junior's Review


He liked it.

But other than that, I was kind of surprised that he sat through the whole thing. It was a risk. I just decided that he was going to watch it. I popped him some popcorn and we watched it all the way through in one sitting (the kid has some minor ADHD). He did ask me once Roy got to the other side of Devil's Tower how much longer it was. Any parent will know the voice he had. He was stretching the limits of his attention. "Almost over," I replied. There were 30 minutes left. And he didn't get up. Watched the wonder unfold. And he was happy with the experience.

And I think that's just a testament to the film itself. It's full of weird stuff considering the conventions of populist filmmaking in America, but this nearly 50 year old movie entertained my 12 year old. That's always nice to see.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Lee Cronin's The Mummy

Normal

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

The Gambler and the Lady (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Oh, well, I was surprisingly engaged with the film for a long stretch, even if the ending just kind of confused me." [YouTube]

Mantrap (or, Man in Hiding) (Rating 2/4) Full Review "Still, it's not terrible as it goes." [YouTube]

The Flanagan Boy (or, Bad Blonde) (Rating 2/4) Full Review "The end result is a dull affair that yields to something decently amusing. Well, at least it ends on a high note." [YouTube]

Spaceways (Rating 2/4) Full Review "I mean…the film is not good. But it's weirdly compelling in parts, and I have to give it props for that." [YouTube]

Face the Music (or, The Black Glove) (Rating 3/4) Full Review "An actual first act. A second act of investigation. A resolution that feels like it makes sense. It's just pretty good filmmaking all around." [YouTube]

Murder by Proxy (or, Heat Wave) (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's tense and surprisingly intelligent emotionally while looking good and getting solid performances (especially from Dane Clark)." [YouTube]

A Stranger Came Home (or, The Unholy Four) (Rating 2/4) Full Review "So, I'm mixed on the film, which is not a surprise by this point. Hammer strikes out in a new direction with something good, and the films just kind of revert to the mean of competence and mediocrity." [YouTube]

36 Hours (or, Terror Street) (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "So, the end result is a small surprise, something that actually does try at emotional heft but doesn't know how to follow through on it." [YouTube]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.
My next thread will be on 5/9 and it will discuss something...I don't know yet.