Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) showed that a film about contact with aliens need be neither an invasion nor a rescue. An electrical lineman in Indiana sees something at night. From then on he becomes fixated on a shape: he builds the same mountain out of shaving foam, out of mud, and finally as an enormous model in his living room. He does not know what it is, only that he has to go there. In parallel a French scientist tracks strange events around the world, looking for a means of communication. What they find is music. Five notes. That is the whole idea: if two species cannot find a shared language, they find a shared sound. How those five notes were chosen is the best story in it. John Williams had a mathematician calculate how many five note combinations exist in a twelve note scale; the answer came back around 134,000. Williams then wrote over three hundred examples and he and Spielberg listened through them one at a time. Williams wanted seven notes; Spielberg insisted on five, saying anything longer was too long for a greeting. François Truffaut plays the scientist. He was known as a director, not an actor. Spielberg later released a version showing the inside of the mothership and regretted it; he removed that passage from subsequent versions. It runs 135 minutes. Good for: science fiction, Spielberg, and film music. Less good for: the pace is slow, the lead abandoning his family is uncomfortable, and there is no action.