Steven Spielberg (1982)
In her rave review in 1982 Pauline Kael wrote that ET ‘seems to clear all the bad thoughts out of your head’. If that’s going too far, it is fair to say that negative thoughts about Steven Spielberg disappear while you’re watching the film. As I’d hoped they would: not having seen it for decades, I decided to go back to ET partly because I found Spielberg’s latest, Disclosure Day, so dismaying. You could say that not much has changed during the nearly half-century interval between them. Both place in opposition benign extra-terrestrials and malign, mistrustful humans, more innocently receptive earthlings mediating between the two. Yet the distance between ET and Disclosure Day, as examples of heartfelt sci-fi entertainment, is to be measured in light years.
The story of ET (like the story of Disclosure Day) was Spielberg’s idea. He outlined it to Melissa Mathison, who wrote the eventual screenplay. In simple terms, the story is a variation on the imaginary friend theme. When Spielberg’s parents’ marriage ended, just as he was entering adolescence, he invented an alien companion – a specifically male companion to compensate for the brother he’d never had and the father he felt he’d now lost. (As anyone who’s seen The Fabelmans (2022) can guess, Spielberg was the eldest of four children but the only boy.) ET’s Elliott Taylor (Henry Thomas), the ten-year-old middle child of three in a suburban California family, has an elder brother, Michael (Robert MacNaughton), and a younger sister, Gertie (Drew Barrymore). Their father is now in Mexico with another woman; their mother, Mary (Dee Wallace), is evidently distressed and struggling to keep things together, running the home single-handed as well as holding down a job. One of a group of extra-terrestrials, visiting Earth at night to gather plant specimens, becomes separated from the others. He’s left behind when, just before American government agents arrive on the scene to investigate evidence of the flying visit, they return to their own planet. The solitary, frightened, far-from-home creature shelters in a shed in the Taylors’ garden, and it’s Elliott who finds him there.
What happens next is cinema history, but it’s worth giving a flavour of ET’s seemingly supernatural abilities and stressing that, for as long as possible, the alien remains concealed from adult view – because these strands are connected. The day after ET’s arrival, Elliott feigns illness to stay away from school, using his home-alone time to coax the alien from the shed into his bedroom, where he remains hidden. Elliott confides in Michael, who scoffs at first. Gertie encounters ET next; Michael does so a while later. The guest is kept a secret from the kids’ mother and, of course, from the authorities, for much longer. ET shows telekinetic powers, levitating balls in Elliott’s room to describe the planetary arrangement he knows closer to home. He instantly brings dead flowers back to life and heals Elliott’s cut finger. The two strands are linked crucially in the idea that children believe in magic and adults don’t. This is made maybe too obvious when Mary reads a bedtime story to Gertie – not only is the story Peter Pan, but the ‘clap your hands if you believe in fairies’ bit of it.
Although Spielberg’s strong personal connection with the storyline may well have helped, that obviously wasn’t sufficient to turn it into a good film. At the same time, presenting childhood as an age of enchantment might have come across as pious and phony, if Spielberg had betrayed emotional distance from the Elliott-ET story. His achievement in ET is to fuse his crowd-pleasing and story-telling skills with what feels like genuine empathy with childlike ways of thinking. Some of the best bits in the film are pieces of daft, unforced humour that you don’t easily associate with Spielberg. The casting of the children is inspired. Henry Thomas is just wonderful as Elliott: that’s all that needs to be said. Drew Barrymore, only seven at the time, was a natural – she seems effortless, yet she already knows how to make the most of a look or a line. In the difficult role of Michael, with one foot in childhood and the other in young adulthood, Robert MacNaughton is funny and touching. Likeable as Dee Wallace is, she and the other adult actors, including Peter Coyote, as a thoughtful and even ambivalent US government agent, don’t stand a chance. That seems right enough in the circumstances.
For all the critical and commercial success that it enjoyed, ET proved to be a notorious victim of the Academy’s preference for pictures with weighty, worthy themes over supposedly mere money-spinners. Made for $10.5m, the film’s box-office receipts amounted to nearly $800m. It won four Oscars but none of the big ones, most of which that year went to Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. (ET won Best Original Score, Visual Effects, Sound and Sound Effects Editing.) It was characteristically decent of Attenborough to recall that ‘I was certain that not only would ET win, but that it should win. It was inventive, powerful, wonderful. I make more mundane movies’. ET‘s big themes – around home and separation, loving and losing – coalesce satisfyingly and movingly. Spielberg does an amazing job of telling a story chiefly through images and music. The title character, designed by Carlo Rambaldi, from his face to his fingertips, can fairly be described as iconic. The same goes for the bike ride up into a full-mooned sky. John Williams’ score is more than the perfect accompaniment to this – it seems to enable the elevation. Elliott and ET are kindred spirits in different ways, ranging from the unaccountable to the shared letters that begin and end their names. Gertie’s handclapping to revive Tinkerbell serves as a kind of anticipation of ET’s quasi-resurrection (and, when his alien companions return for him, ascension to the heavens) – all of which gives rise to uneasy feelings. They’re soon subdued, though, thanks to the finale’s emotional momentum. The only thing I can’t forgive is the film’s helping make Halloween a bigger deal on this side of the Atlantic than it was pre-ET.
Childhood doesn’t last long; a big-league filmmaker’s age of innocence is liable to be transient, too. In Spielberg’s case, this wasn’t a matter of upping the commercial ante. After the colossal success of Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), he was under no immediate pressures, even before ET, to deliver another mega-hit; in any case, he kept raking it in with the next two Indiana Jones movies (in 1984 and 1987). But Spielberg also decided he needed to ‘grow up’ as a director. By the mid-1980s, he was turning to screen adaptations of admired novels – The Color Purple (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987) – and showing much less aptitude for this kind of cinema. He has come up with good heavyweight dramas in his more than fifty years of filmmaking, notably Schindler’s List (1993), but they’re not what he deserves to be celebrated for. In ET, he combines sentimental conviction, visual imagination and spinning-a-yarn flair to terrific effect. He also trusts his audience, regardless of their age. The film thoroughly deserves its lasting reputation as a popular classic.
18 August 2026
