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The farm boy and the twin suns

Luke Skywalker standing alone outside the Lars homestead on Tatooine, watching the twin suns set

The moment that’s stayed with me longest is Luke walking out of the homestead after another argument with Owen about leaving for the Academy, and just standing there watching the twin suns go down while that music swells. Nothing happens. He doesn’t say anything. But I knew exactly what he was feeling the first time I saw it and I still do, that ache of being stuck somewhere small with a life that’s already been decided for you. It’s the same restless-kid-on-a-desert-planet feeling I got watching Paul on Arrakis in Dune: Part One, except Paul’s being dragged towards a destiny he doesn’t want and Luke would give anything for one.

Then the film takes everything away from him in about ten minutes. Obi-Wan shows him his father’s lightsaber and a garbled message from a princess, Luke says no, he can’t go to Alderaan, he’s got work to do, and when he races home the farm is burning and Owen and Beru are dead in the doorway. That’s a brutal turn for what a lot of people remember as a light adventure movie. And it’s what makes his choice land, because he isn’t running off for fun anymore. There’s nothing left here for me now. It’s a sad little line and it’s the whole start of the hero he becomes, the same Luke I watched stare out over a very different ocean decades later in The Last Jedi.

Scoundrels, princesses and an old man in a robe

Mos Eisley is where the film opens right up, and honestly the cantina is still one of my favourite places in all of sci-fi, a dive bar full of weird aliens and a band that only knows one song. That’s where we meet Han Solo, who is exactly the kind of character I wanted to be as a kid: fast talking, cocky, a bit of a crook, with a walking carpet for a best friend and a ship that looks like junk but made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. He’s only in this for the money. He says so, loudly and often. Every smart-mouthed space rogue since, Star-Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy included, owes him a drink.

What I appreciate more on every rewatch is Leia, because she doesn’t need rescuing nearly as much as the boys think she does. She stands up to Tarkin while he blows up her entire planet in front of her, which is horrifying when you actually stop and sit with it, and then when Luke and Han bust into her cell block with no plan at all she grabs a blaster and gets everyone out through the garbage chute herself. Obi-Wan, meanwhile, goes off quietly on his own to switch off the tractor beam and then walks into Vader. I didn’t get that duel as a kid. I thought it was slow. Now I watch Obi-Wan look over at Luke, smile, and lift his lightsaber away, and it’s easily the saddest choice anyone makes in the film, an old man deciding he’s more use to this boy as a voice in his head than as a teacher standing next to him.

Stay on target

Luke Skywalker in his orange flight suit and helmet in the cockpit of his X-wing during the Death Star attack

The last half hour is pure joy for me, even though I know every line of it. The briefing where one pilot says the shot is impossible and Luke shrugs and says he used to bullseye womp rats back home. Red squadron peeling off one after another. Wedge limping out, Biggs getting hit, Vader closing in behind with that awful calm voice, and Obi-Wan telling Luke to use the Force and trust himself instead of the targeting computer. And then, just when there’s nowhere left to go, the Falcon comes screaming out of the sun and knocks Vader spinning off into space. Yahoo! You’re all clear, kid.

That’s Han’s whole arc in one move. The guy who took his reward money and flew off because he wasn’t going to die for somebody else’s cause comes back anyway, and he doesn’t make a speech about it. He just shows up. It’s such a small change on paper and it’s the one that sold me on these people as friends rather than a bunch of strangers thrown together, which is also why the medal ceremony gets me every time, Chewie roaring, Han winking at Leia, R2 all polished up, and Luke finally somewhere that isn’t Tatooine.

The one that started it all for me

It’s hard to explain to anyone younger how big this film was for me and everyone I grew up with, because for a whole generation of fans Star Wars didn’t just join a genre, it birthed one. Before it, space on screen mostly meant grey spaceships and serious men talking about science. After it, space was farm boys and princesses and smugglers, dogfights between starfighters, a galactic empire straight out of the Foundation books but with actual villains you could hiss at. The whole modern sci-fi blockbuster, all of space opera as I’ve known and loved it, kicked off right here, and you can see its fingerprints on everything that came after, down to the ragtag fleet running from an overwhelming enemy in Battlestar Galactica.

Which is probably why I still get giddy about it all these years on, the same giddiness I was gushing about when Star Wars was coming back to cinemas at Christmas. Some of the effects are dated now and some of the dialogue is pure cheese, and I don’t care in the slightest, because the minute that yellow text crawls up the screen I’m a kid again, sitting there waiting for the kid on the farm to look up at the two suns.

Every time I go back to Close Encounters of the Third Kind I think I’m going to watch a movie about aliens, and every time I end up watching a movie about a guy losing his grip on everything he has because he saw something nobody else will believe. That’s the hook for me, and it’s why this Close Encounters of the Third Kind retrospective is really about Roy Neary more than it’s about the mothership. The aliens are the destination. Roy’s the trip. And honestly I’ve done this rewatch enough times now that I know every beat coming, the truck at the railway crossing, the sunburn on half his face, the mashed potatoes, and it still works on me like it’s the first time.

What gets me on every rewatch is how ordinary it all starts. Roy’s a power company lineman in Indiana, he’s got a wife and three loud kids and a house that’s always a bit of a mess, and he’s sent out one night during a blackout and just happens to be sitting in his truck when something parks itself directly overhead. The mailboxes start rattling. Everything metal in the cab goes nuts. Then it’s gone and he’s got half a face of sunburn and a shape stuck in his head that he can’t explain, and from that point on he isn’t really the same guy.

Barry, Jillian and the orange door

Young Barry Guiler standing in the open front door as blinding orange light floods in from outside

Running alongside Roy is Jillian Guiler and her little boy Barry, and their half of the story is the scariest stuff in the whole film, which surprises people who only remember the lights and the music. Barry isn’t afraid of any of it. He’s thrilled, laughing, running off into the night after the toys come alive on their own, and the scene where the visitors come back to the farmhouse for him is pure horror movie. The appliances going haywire, the screws backing themselves out of the vent cover, Jillian trying to hold every door and window shut at once. And then Barry opens the front door into that orange light and he’s gone, dragged out through the dog flap while she’s screaming, and you’re left with this weird split where the thing that’s so wondrous for Roy is also the thing that just kidnapped a four-year-old.

That tension never gets fully cleared up, and I kind of love that it doesn’t. It’s the same question I had walking out of Disclosure Day, where the visitors are supposed to be the good guys and nobody wants to talk too much about the people who went missing along the way. Close Encounters just lets it sit. Jillian becomes Roy’s only real ally because she’s the one person who’s been through it too, and she’s also got the most reason in the world to be furious at whatever’s up there, but she still goes to that mountain. For Barry, sure. But also because she needs to know.

This means something, this is important

This is where the film gets properly uncomfortable, and it’s the part I think about most. Roy’s obsession eats him alive. He’s sculpting the shape out of shaving cream, out of pillows, and at dinner he’s carving a mountain out of his mashed potatoes while his kids stare at him and he says, quietly, this means something, this is important. It’s funny for about two seconds. Then it isn’t. By the time he’s shovelling dirt and shrubs through the kitchen window to build a floor-to-ceiling version in the living room while the neighbours watch, Ronnie’s had enough, and she bundles the kids into the car and drives away with them screaming at him.

I’ve gone back and forth on Ronnie over the years. As a kid I thought she was the villain for not believing him. Now, as a dad, I watch that sequence and I think she did the only sane thing available to her, because Roy’s losing his job, scaring the kids, and he isn’t coming back from wherever his head has gone. The film doesn’t hide it either, the family comes last and Roy barely seems to notice they’ve left until the TV news shows him Devils Tower and everything clicks. It’s the same pull I felt watching Cooper leave his kids behind in Interstellar, except Cooper’s going to save them and Roy’s just going because he has to.

Meanwhile the scientists have been chasing it from the other end. Lacombe and his team are turning up planes that vanished decades ago sitting perfectly fine in the desert, a ship stranded in the Gobi, crowds in India all singing the same five notes and pointing at the sky, and it’s all building towards the same place Roy and Jillian are driving to. The army’s cover story is a nerve gas leak, so there are evacuation trains and gas masks everywhere, and the two of them climbing past all that to get to the tower is a lovely little adventure on its own, the pair of them scrambling up the rocks while the helicopters dust the hillside.

The mothership, and Roy’s choice

Two men in silhouette facing a crowd of small, thin aliens against the bright white light of the mothership at Devils Tower

And then the last half hour, which is still one of my favourite stretches of any sci-fi film I’ve seen. The little scout ships dancing over the landing strip, the long pause, and then the mothership rising up behind the tower like a city turning up to visit. The two sides talk in music, five notes back and forth that turn into a proper jam session, and it’s such a gentle way to do first contact. No death rays. No speeches. It’s the opposite of Independence Day, where the first thing the ship does is burn the White House, and it’s the direct ancestor of Arrival, where the whole story is someone patiently working out how to say hello.

The ship opens and out come the missing. The pilots from the lost squadron, not a day older, people who vanished from all over, stepping back into a world that’s moved on without them the way Rose does after her missing year, and Barry, who runs straight into Jillian’s arms like he’s been away for an afternoon. That reunion gets me every single time. Then the visitors walk out, small and thin and backlit so you can barely make them out, and Roy, who’s only ever wanted to understand what was in his head, gets picked to go with them. He looks back at Jillian once. Then he walks into the light.

I don’t think I’ll ever fully settle how I feel about that ending, and I’ve made peace with that. Part of me cheers, because Roy was right all along, the vision meant something, and he gets the one thing he’s been tearing his life apart for. Part of me, the dad part, keeps thinking about Ronnie and the kids back in Indiana who’ll never know what happened to him, and apparently I’m not the only one who’s changed their mind on it with age. It’s the truth is out there fantasy played completely straight, a believer who turns out to be right and gets rewarded, and it costs him everything else. What stays with me on this rewatch is that small alien at the foot of the ramp, doing the hand signs back at Lacombe and giving him the most knowing little smile, like it’s been waiting the whole film for somebody to finally get it.