Subject: Review: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

From: Jonathan F. Richards <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 18:46:52 -0000

IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards

E.T. THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL

     E.T. is back.  Well, no, he's not really back.  He's here again for the
first time.  And he's just as wonderful this time around.  

     Steven Spielberg is a class act.  It's hard to imagine many other
filmmakers in this profit-maddened day and age resisting the megabucks that
would roll in from an "E.T. 2".   (The lovable little alien misses Elliott, and
returns to earth.  Elliott, now thirty, is a failed TV writer struggling to kick
his methadone habit.  A touch from the glowing finger of the extra-terrestrial
puts him back in the pink, and together the two pals set out on a wacky
cross-galaxy road trip in their beat-up UFO....)

     No, no!  It's still 1982, and E.T. is just the way you remember him.  This
is very nearly a perfect movie, assuming you still have some trace of childhood
left in you.  An Inner Child will do.  Like J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, a story
which Spielberg uses here as a conscious point of reference, "E.T." is a paean
to childhood, to the fleeting magic years of imaginary friends who fade away
like Puff the Magic Dragon under the withering onslaught of adolescence.  

     The grownups in this movie are always seen from the low angle of a child's
perspective.  They're faceless, threatening creatures, and what they threaten is
the fantasy world of childhood itself.  For most of the movie the only adult
face we see is the mother (Dee Wallace-Stone), who is, after all, the main link
between the child's world and the grimmer world of grownups.  Later on we get a
scientist (Peter Coyote), whose credentials for admission are that his boyhood
dreams are still alive - "I've been wishing for this since I was ten years old,"
he tells Elliott (Henry Thomas).  And then, in that terrible moment when E.T.'s
vital signs stop under the detached probing of the team of government
scientists, the spell is broken, the masks come off, the camera swings up, and
the bland, earthbound faces of the grownups emerge into commonplace.  In this
flawlessly-captured world  of childhood, it is the grownups whore are the true
aliens.

     Spielberg has said that "E.T." is his most personal movie.  It springs from
the longings and insecurities he felt as a child over the break-up of his
parents, and that situation is mirrored in Elliott's life, with the father
decamped and off "in Mexico with Sally."  In that unsettled world, a boy needs a
special friend, and who better than a wizened little extraterrestrial who
combines the irrepressible cuteness of a puppy with the wisdom and can-do
capability of an absent father?  During the shooting of "Raiders of the Lost
Ark" Spielberg spent countless hours pouring out his heart to star Harrison
Ford's girlfriend, screenwriter Melissa Mathison, who fashioned "E.T.'s"
wonderful screenplay.

     The movie in its twentieth anniversary re-release has the added resonance
of nostalgia.  The world has changed since then, the kids have all grown up. 
Henry Thomas was recently in "All the Pretty Horses", and has five movies
awaiting release this year.  Drew Barrymore has been through rehab and two
marriages that lasted a total of seven months, and this year will fill the big
screen as "Barbarella".  We know a bit about their futures, but little Gertie is
still the same self-possessed, adorable moppet who crows "I taught him how to
talk!", and Elliott is still the same unswervingly loyal kid.  

     Much has been made of the changes Spielberg has wrought in refurbishing his
classic for re-issue.  In the climactic chase scene he has digitally replaced
the guns in the agents' hands with walkie-talkies, which would seem like
silliness if you noticed it, but I got so caught up in the moment that it went
right by me.  More noticeable (and sillier) is the change in an off-screen line
when Mom criticizes her older son's Halloween costume, replacing the word
"terrorist" with "hippie."  The kid is dressed as a bum with a cleaver in his
skull, and looks nothing like a hippie, and the mom, a veteran of the flower
child generation, ought to know the difference.  There are digital tweaks in
E.T.'s expressions and movements that are all to the good, and a funny scene in
a bathtub restored from excised footage.

     And - this may have always been there, but you notice it now - hanging in
the night sky above the shed where E.T. takes shelter, there is a crescent moon
which looks awfully like the Dreamworks logo.

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