Reviews

I love this film. I first watched it as a young child in the early 1980s, and I was as spellbound then as I am now by its beauty, its mystery, and its questions. And until today I thought that everyone must feel pretty much the same way I do about Close Encounters - it has to be one of those films, like Shawshank or Star Wars, that there is universal love for? Surely no one could actually dislike this masterpiece??

But, oh yes they do! And for the life of me I cannot understand why.

First off, I have to speak to some of the other, mostly more recent, reviews on here that talk about Close Encounters being "slow paced" and "boring" - what on Earth is going on there! This is a story that takes us from the grandest of international conspiracies and cover-ups, into the slowly disintegrating mind of a normal guy who's life falls apart for no apparent reason, via the sheer terror of a mother watching her house come alive to snatch her son out of her arms, to a crash course in Ufology in 90 minutes, all setting up the most dazzling 30 minutes of finale ever filmed. What more do some people want?? Did they want Richard Dreyfuss to have his Close Encounter in his truck, and then five minutes later did they want him turning up at Devil's Tower, bags packed and ready to fly off into space? Or did they want to see what in the Universe could drive him to do this, and rip his young family apart in the process?

Did they want to see the Mother Ship fly in from screen right to hover over Washington DC or London in the opening scene of the movie, or would they prefer to wonder what the hell was going on with oil tankers in the desert and thousands of Indian mystics pointing at the sky, as the story was revealed to them bit by bit, gorgeous scene by gorgeous scene?

Is it that they just couldn't understand what was going on, so they gave up and said "it's rubbish, don't want to" like some toddler desperate for another go on an iPad when they are being taught how to tie their shoelaces?

I just don't get it. They are watching the late 20th century equivalent of Michaleangelo sculpt David, when what they want is 45 minutes of Transformers like explosions, 10 minutes of inane exposition, and then highlights of the scenes at Devil's Tower. It's nuts, and it makes you wonder just what on Earth are people going to make of movies like Casablanca or High Noon when they stumble across them in some horrific future where they think their phone screen has broken because the picture is in black and white.

I guess my incredulity began when I was sent to a Neil DeGrasse Tyson video by the YouTube algorithm, where he was ranking sci-fi films according to his estimation. If you haven't seen the clip in question, then you've got shocks coming. He rates Matrix Reloaded as better (and seemingly more scientifically accurate) than Close Encounters, more or less based on a misplaced revisionism that Spielberg should have included more black scientists in the movie. In 1977. In a story about a white guy from Muncie, Indiana, and an international conspiracy of old white men to keep aliens secret from the public. Now, please don't think this means that I think that movies today shouldn't be representative of society, or that we can't criticise what has come before. But in the same way I once saw a Redditor dismiss the whole of Hill Street Blues because Renko didn't expressly call out a domestic abuser a few minutes into the pilot episode, you can't dismiss something of the majesty of Close Encounters because Spielberg asked Truffant to star in his movie instead of Sidney Poitier. I'm sure if Spielberg was making this today he would cast it appropriately, as he did in 1977.

DeGrasse Tyson doubles down on this later on by praising Contact and other movies for how they show that society might go a little bit nuts if aliens turned up on BBC News or Al Jazeera tomorrow, yet he slates Close Encounters for daring to suggest that our governments might be wanting to keep certain things from us.... At least Mr DeGrasse Tyson deserves his rant, given his sheer output of public good, but that privilege we cannot give to the goofs in these reviews who talk about how a movie made when Jimmy Carter was President "looks dated" - spoiler: it is, the movie was written and produced nearly 50 years ago, and people genuinely did dress like thay!

Yet the storytelling stands up, the cinematography is magnificent, the sound is out of this world, and the film contains some of the greatest special effects ever created - by the greatest of all special effect creators, Douglas Trumbull - and gives us the five most famous notes in all of cinema as not just a motif, but also as one of the best plot points in history. Just look at the people involved in making this movie: Spielberg, Trumbull, Dreyfuss, John Williams, Francois Truffant, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon and Allen J Hynek. It's like Real Madrid brought some Galacticos onto set for us. What more do people want!

For those of you confused who could noy understand the story, the aliens have been watching Earth for generations, if not centuries. They have been snatching humans out of thin air, and in secret, for some unexplained reason, but have now decided to make contact. To do this they randomly choose a one horse town in the Mexican desert, the dusty plains of Northern India, and the skies above Muncie, Indiana, until an international government effort makes contact in return, and everyone heads to Devil's Tower. We never find out what the aliens want, or why they have been abducting people and animals for decades, nor do we find out what our governments are getting in return for the red-suited volunteers they are so willing to give up.

Instead we get to use our imagination, and wonder. Wonder. That is the key word, WONDER. This movie is designed to thrill you, to entertain you, to shock you and scare you, and to make you think, but it's mainly designed to make you sit there with awe in your eyes and take it all in. It's meant to do to the viewer what Pinocchio did to Spielberg when he was a kid, or when he lay back under the night sky and wished upon a star.

Sometimes I just worry for people, for what they are losing by means of appreciation. If you can honestly sit there and not be enthralled when the spaceship takes off at the end, as the credits roll and the score soars, then just give up, just stop watching movies. Go and kill some zombies on your Xbox, or slag off the fans of a pop star you don't like in the comments of a tiktok video. You just don't understand the magic, and you never will.

Or at least stop putting out dumb reviews of movies that you know people are going to find "unhelpful" - just like this.

This is the first in a strange, and often bewildering tradition of Official FIFA World Cup Films, a series rarely (and somewhat unfairly) recognised for its artistic merit and lack of bombast. Our setting this time is picture box Switzerland, lovingly photographed by a team of Swiss and West German cameramen, none of whom seem to be in tight control of a mishmash of a film that doesn't quite know what it wants to be - part travelogue, part football highlights film, part weird road movie.

First, we need to remember when and how this was made. Football broadcasting in the 1950s was in its infancy, so while Eurovision was able to film eight games from the competition with its television cameras, few people could actually watch the games at home. Instead the vast majority of the public relied on newsreel highlights shown in cinemas, often weeks after the event. And it is on this newsreel style footage that Fußball Weltmeistershaft 1954 (or German Giants as FIFA has since subtitled it) relies for much of its imagery.

Here in lies our first problem. Much of the newsreel footage is sped up and we are presented with action from what was the most attacking World Cup ever at artificial breakneck speeds that make the play look even more chaotic than it really was. Now this in itself is not a huge issue - any footage of this tournament is better than no footage after all - but when we add the more miss than hit commentary into this mix, things get pretty hard to follow. Action is always going to be missed when the cameraman is using a newsreel camera with one fixed shot, but when the commentary tells you one thing is going on, while something else entirely is shown on screen, you get the picture....

The commentary is also spectacularly biased toward the West German team throughout the film, which is again perhaps not surprising given that it was originally recorded in German, for a German speaking market. But the English translation ends up sounding too much like the Nazi radio commentator from Escape to Victory, especially when glossing over the appalling treatment Ferenc Puskas was subjected to, both by dirty West German play in the first game, and incompetent refereeing in the Final. Again, we have to remind ourselves that it was a different age, and formal spoken English of the time was rather staid and passionless, but here that is taken to an art form, unless it is describing the (pretty lucky) West German performance.

But is this just hindsight speaking? The West German victory in 1954 is still known as the "Miracle of Berne" to this day, while Herbert Zimmerman's iconic, crazed radio commentary of "Tor! Tor! Tor! Tor!" when Fritz Walter scored the winning goal was full of passion, and was said to have finally allowed the German people to be proud again after the war. So maybe we are just missing out by not seeing this in it's original language? When we consider though that every second of the film is accompanied by an interminable fast waltz or polka (even through the ruthless Battle of Berne quarter final), all the good feeling seems to get lost however.

There is one hair-brained idea that totally ruins this production though. That is Marko....

Marko is a stereotypically Teutonic teenage boy introduced after the first game, five minutes into the film. We meet him sat at home with his brother, obsessing over the radio commentary of what we have to assume is the France-Yugoslavia game we have just seen. Now Marko would have been unremarkable had the producers left him there, or even if we saw him similarly as the action developed. He could have been the everyman figure, eagerly sharing his love of football with the world. But no, Marko had to be in Berne for the final, and we have to follow how he gets there.... I like to think that somewhere in Switzerland there is an 80 year old Marko sitting there, oblivious to the fact that he has been derided for seven decades for this "journey". But that is not going to stop me spelling it all out here.

Marko has to be one of the least likeable characters any film has ever created. First of all he is a terrible brother and son. He starts off by angrily ignoring his brother's attempts to placate his blood lust to be in Berne, and then steals his Mum's savings to go to buy a ticket for the final. After doing this he realises that he doesn't have enough money to fly (in 1954!) across Switzerland, so he steals a boat and runs away from home.

His mum by this point must be equal parts angry and terrified, but Marko doesn't care. After being dragged in his purloined rowing boat across Lake Geneva, he manages to fall in the lake (while being provocatively careless), but swims to Charlie Chaplin's house nonetheless! Whether old Charlie knew anything about this is never mentioned again, because the next time we see Marko he is eating chips near a garage, where he decides to steal a mechanic's hat so he can use this cunning disguise to possibly steal a car.

When that somehow fails straight away he approaches a woman on a moped, at least ten years his senior, and gives her a kiss, upon which she takes him straight to Berne!

Sadly Marko loses his match ticket while trying to impress this lovely lady with his handkerchief, because the next time we see him - and before the final can be shown - he is having a tantrum outside the Wankdorf stadium! Now Marko is not just a thief and a liar, he is also incredibly trusting, as he agrees to climb into the boot of a car that a stranger tells him is allowed to enter the stadium. Thankfully Marko is not driven off to be dismembered in some Alpine dungeon at this point, but instead reappears in a car park, where the friendly driver lets him out of the boot. Marko still isn't inside the stadium though, so he climbs onto the roof of a car advertising Ovaltine (who we can only think paid for this rampant product placement) that proceeds to drive him back to where we saw him before at the stadium.

Even now this sordid tale of teenage misdemeanor is not over, because interspersed with action from the first half of one of the most famous and important games in football history we go back to Marko to see him photographing something with a tiny spy camera! Maybe it's all a Cold War thriller not a football documentary? Who knows!

What we do know is at this point the commentator loses all interest in Marko at this juncture, and blatantly ignores the fact that he has somehow gained entry into the West German dressing room at half time and slides up to Fritz Walter to interrupt the instructions he is getting from Sepp Herberger. Once he has received an autograph from a happy looking Walter, Marko then intermingles with the Hungarian team as it comes back out for the second half, pausing only to give one daft grin for the camera as a confused Swiss gendarme pushes him onto the field!

Thankfully that is that for Marko. The producers haven't arranged for him to stroll onto the pitch during the game - although maybe it is him that is playing Puskas offside during his phantom equaliser at the end of the match - and we can only rejoice that he has not superceded Jules Rimet during the prize giving ceremonies at the end.

This travesty takes up a good quarter of the film's runtime, and when you add in the "pleasant strolls" around the Swiss host cities that we are treated too, and the constant cut away shots of sweating men in the crowd, the distractions easily add up to 45 minutes out of the 88 minute total length.

Someone in Switzerland thought all this was a good idea in 1954, and in doing so they unwittingly created the slightly unhinged nature of this series of films. Every official film contains something downright weird, and every lingering shot of a coach in a Spanish country lane, every drunken Irish spectator, and every lunatic with an air rifle in the stands, is there because Marko gave them precedent. World Cup official films don't just show us football, they strive to show us anything else going on, regardless of need, motive or time. And for that we can blame one selfish, teenage tearaway kleptomaniac called Marko....