| RATING: | 100% |
| FORMAT: | Cinema |
Brilliant proof that the video-sated public does not hunger, meretriciously, for all that sex ‘n’ violence claimed by the cynics, but for superior entertainment like this - based primarily on a basic sense of humanity and of the importance of a place for properly-understood and expressed emotion in fulfilling human lives.
This film is emotionally-realistic (ie, melodramatic) rather than literally so, and those who do not understand the role of emotions in our lives will always find such visual tropes difficult to countenance. In this, this movie is a delirious piece of poetry when compared to the prosaic claptrap we have come to expect from our local multiplex in recent years.
US cinema went through an all-too-brief phase of presenting alien visitors to Earth as friendly and loveable; beginning with this director's own Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg). Audiences responded - big-time - to these movies, but we now live in a cultural world returned to its Cold War so-called certainties of ever-present threat and the permanent cultural warfare of Western elites against their own citizens to justify increasing arms’ expenditure by claiming the world is a far more dangerous place than ever before. Like the Hollywood movies of the 1950s, contemporary cinema (2011) is awash with either not so friendly aliens; mirroring the current anti-immigrant political rhetoric of the West (eg, Spielberg’s own War of the Worlds (2005) & Independence Day (1996)) and/or predicted environmental disaster on a global scale (eg, 2012 (2009) & The Day After Tomorrow (2004)). Films that are not as popular - in terms of bums-on-seats - but which continue to be made for ideological reasons, in the hope that the public will prefer them so that they can be churned out as a formulaic peplum for the easier obtaining of profits from a fickle public - as well as because better films are harder to make. A terrible pity since entertaining and escapist propaganda to justify losing ones civil rights - and diverting our attention from the fact - never rises above the level of entertaining and escapist propaganda.
What makes this movie work so well is the fact that (like Big (1988)) over-ripe special effects are largely eschewed in favor of human values and scale. The director’s famous ability at handling children in his movies and removing the Hollywood tendency to overweening cuteness is well to the fore here - as well as the inherently-excellent acting abilities of the chosen cast. Henry THOMAS & Drew BARRYMORE are particularly affecting in this regard. Spielberg sees the world as children do and the movie has a distinct first-person feel to it - especially as most of the adults are shown from the groin down since the camera is mostly placed at the child’s height. This leads to a depth of characterization for the child stars that is unusual in Western films that usually treat children as beings who should be seen and not heard.
Ultimately, a hopeful film about friendship between different peoples: Ethnicities, cultures, genders, classes and aliens that transcends its kiddie-film origins with Christian theology (birth, death, resurrection & Ascension) to create a movie of such greatness that there is simply nothing as good to compare it with. A movie worth watching more than once and the last truly great film Hollywood ever produced. (The Special Edition simply - and pointlessly - tries to perfect the already perfect.)
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