E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is where it started for me, and I’d bet money it’s where it started for a whole generation of kids. Before the spaceships and the starfields and the long shelf of paperbacks, there was a ten-year-old in a suburban backyard finding something in the shed that shouldn’t have been there. I’ve watched it more times than I can count, I’ve sat my own kids down in front of it, and I honestly don’t have a bad word to say about it. Not one. I loved it as a kid, I love it now, and the fact that it works just as well on a child who’s never heard of it tells you most of what you need to know.
What gets me every time is how small it is. Coming a few years after Close Encounters and its big glowing mothership at Devils Tower, and A New Hope with its two suns, this is a film where first contact happens next to a pile of garden tools. The aliens aren’t here to change the world. One of them got left behind, and a lonely kid with a divorced mom and a bullying older brother is the only person who notices. It’s a story about being lost and about somebody being kind to you anyway, and the science fiction is just the way it gets told. Spoilers from here on, but you know how it ends, and I’d argue knowing makes it hit harder.
A boy, a shed and a trail of candy
Elliott is the first thing the film gets right. He’s the kid who’s always getting left out, the one Michael and his friends won’t let into their game, and his dad’s gone off to Mexico with somebody else so the whole house feels tilted. When he finds E.T. the grown-ups don’t believe him, because of course they don’t, and I love that nobody in his family takes it seriously until it’s far too late. So he does what any kid would do, which is leave a trail of Reese’s Pieces from the woods to his bedroom and hope for the best. It works, and then there’s that wonderful stretch where the three kids, Elliott and Michael and little Gertie, are hiding a creature in a closet full of stuffed animals and nobody quite knows what they’ve got.
The middle of the film is just pure fun, and this is the part I think my own kids liked best. E.T. watching TV and picking up English one word at a time, getting into the fridge and the beer, dressing up in Gertie’s wig and necklaces, building a communicator out of a Speak and Spell and a coat hanger so he can phone home. The Halloween night is my favourite piece of it, E.T. wobbling down the street in a bedsheet while kids in costumes pass him by, and then he spots somebody dressed as Yoda and loses his mind a little. It’s funny and sweet, and it’s also the moment you realise how much he wants to go home, because the whole joke is that he’s looking for anything familiar in a world that’s all costumes.
Then there’s the part that always makes me want to cheer a bit. The frog dissection scene in Elliott’s biology class, where E.T. is sitting at home drunk on beer and Elliott can feel it, so he starts freeing the frogs and then kisses a girl. I’d never describe this movie as a comedy, but that sequence is genuinely a laugh-out-loud one, and it also shows you the thing the whole film is built on, that these two are connected. When E.T. feels something, Elliott feels it too. It’s a bond that ends up being the real heart of the film more than any of the spaceship business, two lonely creatures who each miss a home and happen to find one in the other.
When the grown-ups arrive
The film turns on a dime, and I remember being scared of this part as a kid. E.T. goes grey and weak, the flowers he brought back to life are dying, and Elliott is sick too, pale and shivering, until the house is suddenly sealed up in plastic and full of men in spacesuits. That’s the government finally showing up, and the thing I love is that the film never makes them cartoon villains exactly. The scientist is gentle with Elliott, he’s wanted to meet something like this his whole life, he just can’t stop being a scientist about it. But from the kids’ side of things they’re monsters, taking away the only friend Elliott has ever really had, and from E.T.’s side it’s pure terror.
And then E.T. dies, or seems to, laid out on a table with Elliott crying beside him telling him he’ll be right here, and it’s the sort of scene that shouldn’t be allowed in a family film. I’ve seen it a dozen times and I still choke up a bit, because it’s so honest about what it feels like to love something and watch it slip away. Then the geranium blooms in the dumpster, the heart light glows back on, and the kid in me shouts every time. The chase after that is joyful in a way that’s hard to describe, all the neighbourhood kids on BMX bikes pedalling like mad with a flying alien in a basket, the government vans screaming behind them, and then the bikes just lift off and soar. It’s the image everybody remembers, that little silhouette across the moon, and even knowing it’s coming it makes me grin like an idiot.
Saying goodbye
The goodbye is the part I’d point to if someone asked what the film is really about. E.T. isn’t going to stay, he can’t, and what makes Elliott a hero isn’t that he fights to keep his friend, it’s that he lets him go. Michael gets his own beat there too, the older brother who spent the whole film being a pain finally getting to be the guy who helps, and Gertie hands over the flowers. Then E.T. touches Elliott’s forehead with that glowing finger and says “I’ll be right here,” and that’s it, the ship rises, the rainbow trails behind it, and I’m a mess. I don’t care how many times I’ve watched it.
I think that’s why it shaped so many of us. It told us space could be wonderful and not just frightening, that the thing from out there might be gentle and scared and need our help, and that growing up means being brave enough to say goodbye to something you love. Even the look of it feels like a kid’s eye view, and the Halloween costumes and suburban streets have that timeless, slightly dreamy quality that makes it feel like a memory even if you weren’t born yet. Later films about people meeting the unknown, like Arrival or the newer Disclosure Day, keep circling the same question, what do we do when something strange turns up and needs us to be kind. E.T. answered it first and answered it simply.
What was the first sci-fi movie that made you fall in love with the genre, and did you ever get to share it with your own kids? Tell me in the comments.