Most creators are lucky if they ever make one truly revolutionary thing in their lives. Steven Spielberg has made at least six. He's had his misfires and genuine failures along the way, but Spielberg has reshaped multiple genres and filmmaking as a whole in his wake.
Many of his movies have become part of the bedrock of worldwide culture. There are multiple different trends and revivals that can be traced straight back to Spielberg, from Indiana Jones' faux-serial period action to Saving Private Ryan redefining war films to virtually every monster movie made after 1975. In retrospect, however, there's one entertainment subgenre that we might not give Spielberg enough credit for, and that's the alien conspiracy thriller. 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind was Spielberg's second big hit after Jaws.
While it hasn't latched onto the popular imagination in quite the way that some of Spielberg's later films did, it's hard not to see Close Encounters' influence on the subsequent alien-abduction films and TV of the 1980s and 1990s. If you're interested in seeing Close Encounters for yourself in advance of its 50th anniversary, YouTube is currently airing it for free, albeit with ads. Even better, YouTube's version is the Spielberg-endorsed Director's Cut from 1998, which reverses some changes that were made to the film in its 1980 Special Edition.
When I was a kid, I always thought Close Encounters was the third film in a series, based solely upon the title. In fact, the name comes from the 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, by J. Hynek was a scientific consultant on Close Encounters, and even makes a cameo at one point in the film. (Look for the guy at Devils Tower smoking the pipe.) In his book, Hynek proposed a scale of classification for UFO sightings, which ranged from #1 (strange lights in the sky) to #6 (encountering a UFO that comes alongside an 'animated entity,' such as a human pilot or genuine alien).
The latter three stages on Hynek's scale are labeled as "close encounters," the last and most significant of which, the “third kind,” provided the final name for the film. It’s another term for what’s now more commonly called “first contact.” Close Encounters opens in 1977, as multiple lost aircraft have suddenly reappeared in the middle of the California desert. As a team of scientists tries to figure out what's happened, multiple UFOs are sighted all over the world.
In Muncie, Indiana, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) is called out to address a local power outage. While working, a near-miss from a passing UFO burns half of Roy's face. After that encounter, Roy quickly becomes obsessed with the UFOs, which endangers his relationship with his wife Ronnie (Teri Garr) and their children.
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