Steven Spielberg

The visuals are stunning, Rylance's performance is very moving, and the animation of the giant is astonishingly lithe, fluid and tender to great effect. The humour is sweet and lovely, and the action is exciting. Alas, the plot has virtually no forward momentum until the last half hour or so of the running time, making the actual watching it all a bit of a slog despite these many qualities.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this. It was rather depressing to begin with – high-rise buildings being knocked down by a big businessman, and a rather sad group of people who really wanted to keep their place. This group includes an elderly married couple who run a café; the wife appears to have early forms of dementia. Then there’s an artist whose girlfriend has just left him, a prize-fighter who doesn’t speak to anyone, and a young pregnant woman.

The elderly man is at show more his wits’ end when help comes from a most unexpected source…

It’s amusing in places, albeit poignant, and the effects are quite clever for the time (1980s). They mostly still look good even with today’s advanced sophistication. But then Steven Spielberg directed it, and this was the era of ET.

I enjoyed it, on the whole, the first time I saw it. The second time, eighteen years later, I thought it rather depressing and disjointed. It's rated PG but not suitable for children. Yet with the cute sci-fi effects, it's not for those looking for a more serious film either. I doubt if we'll see it again.

Latest longer review: https://suesdvdreviews.blogspot.com/2026/04/batteries-not-included-jessica-tandy... show less

I started reading "CE3K: the Novel" when I was camping at Devil's Tower, Wyoming.

Too "on the nose"? Maybe, but like Roy Neary with his living-room sculpture of the Wyoming national monument, I was nerdily obsessed. I began the book with low expectations. I should have kept them even lower.

This is a great book, if you like a textual detailed description of what we got on screen with "Close Encounters." It follows the movie closely with only the smallest of side roads into scenes that we never show more saw on film. Those were best left on the cutting room floor for the book as well.

This is a book with low self-esteem. It hardly rises to the level of art and in many places, the writing comes across as a high-school freshman trying to impress their English teacher who only ends up cringing with horror that he has not been doing as good a job at teaching as he supposed. In other words, "CE3K: the Novel" is paperback dreck which should only appeal to the most Mothership-obsessed fan who wants to prolong their Spielbergian cinematic masterpiece experience (for the record, I think the movie is pretty close to a masterpiece; the book is not).

For the record, "Steven Spielberg" didn't write this book, he only put some spit and polish on the hard work of Mr. Leslie Waller. As the movie's Wikipedia page explains, quoting Spielberg: "I didn't write the first, second, or third drafts. Those were written, based on my screenplay, by Leslie Waller, a very good* writer. (*eh....The Eds.) When I read his drafts, though, I told the publishers that unless it was cleaned up I wouldn't let my name go out with the book. So I sat down and spent less than a week – I wouldn't say rewriting the novel – but polishing it, and taking a lot of the plot and twisting it back into the direction of the screenplay. All told, there's about 20 percent of me in the book. I wish I could say there was more, but there's not. I cringe when I see my name on the cover, and I usually avoid it at bookstores." show less

Gets an undeservedly bad reputation, in my opinion. This was my initial impression in the movie theatre, and it's stayed my impression on rewatches in the many years since. While certainly far from perfect, the film feels like a natural and genuine continuation, and has virtually the exact same tone and feel as "Last Crusade" did. The callbacks are cute, relatively organic (and in several cases, surprisingly subtle by the franchise's standards) and the plotline is exciting and different show more without being jarringly so. I definitely like "Lost Ark" and "Last Crusade" better, but the latter not by much, and all three of them are immensely superior to "Temple of Doom" (Short Round aside). show less