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
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
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.