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JoshZ

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BTW, I always hated the "inside the mothership" ending.

For one, it's just boring. Nothing happens so we just see Roy wander around what looks like some kinda alien shopping mall.

For another, it's wholly anticlimactic. The emotional drama climaxes with Roy's departure, so the interiors of the mothership just feel pointless and add nothing.

Do some people like those shots? I guess, but I loathe them.

I don't like any of the endings to this movie. The story climaxes when the ship lands and Roy sees the aliens descend the ramp, thus validating his obsession and everything he's done. Let the John Williams score swell up and cut to credits right there, and it'd be a nearly perfect film.

Whether you see the interior of the ship or not, having Roy abandon his family to take a joyride on the spaceship crosses the line from Roy being a complicated character to being a loathsome one. What an a'hole. Especially when we've already seen his new aliens buds ripping an innocent child away from its mother's arms for reasons we will never know.
 

Lord Dalek

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I literally just noticed this...
20220817_213150.jpg


Anybody know how the hell did the Neerys end up with a Margaret Keane?
 

Lord Dalek

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Whether you see the interior of the ship or not, having Roy abandon his family to take a joyride on the spaceship crosses the line from Roy being a complicated character to being a loathsome one. What an a'hole. Especially when we've already seen his new aliens buds ripping an innocent child away from its mother's arms for reasons we will never know.

That's a really interesting take considering how Roy's wife and children are absolutely horrid people and have already abandoned him by that point.
 

TravisR

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Whether you see the interior of the ship or not, having Roy abandon his family to take a joyride on the spaceship crosses the line from Roy being a complicated character to being a loathsome one. What an a'hole. Especially when we've already seen his new aliens buds ripping an innocent child away from its mother's arms for reasons we will never know.
I disagree with you (and Spielberg) and look at it as Roy has been chosen to do something that no human in history has done. He's making the sacrifice of a piece of his life and being with his family and that sacrifice will further mankind's knowledge of the beings that we share the galaxy with.
 

Sega

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Just to let everyone know.
Amazon has it now.
$12 + change. Just ordered one.
Will see what I get in two days.
 

Kyle_D

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I doubt this will ever see a physical re-release, but this was an early HDR catalog title, and the HDR grade hasn't aged especially well IMO. The highlights are over boosted and don't ramp up or roll off naturally. The disc was impressive for its time, but in hindsight, it looks like an experimental release. The more recent HDR grades for Spielberg's other UHD catalog titles have fared much better.
 

Kyle_D

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That's a really interesting take considering how Roy's wife and children are absolutely horrid people and have already abandoned him by that point.
As I've grown older, I've grown to sympathize a lot more with Neary's wife and children.

CE3K is great, but it's very much written and directed from the perspective of a hyper-obsessive wunderkind who has never had any real responsibilities to anyone other than himself, as Spielberg readily acknowledges.
 

Josh Steinberg

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I disagree with you (and Spielberg) and look at it as Roy has been chosen to do something that no human in history has done. He's making the sacrifice of a piece of his life and being with his family and that will further mankind's knowledge of the beings that we share the galaxy with.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. If Roy was a father and husband who felt a calling to join the armed forces, where he could very conceivably be sent to his death fighting in a conflict that would be mostly forgotten in a couple decades, no one would blink an eye or call him selfish. He’d be praised as patriotic, putting his country ahead of himself, and we’d call his family heroic for their sacrifice. I would argue that Roy is doing something to benefit the entire species, which to my way of thinking is an even more noble calling than patriotism.

That doesn’t even get into the fact that his wife and children abandoned him when he needed them most. Something happened to Roy which profoundly changed him. Even if his family was unwilling or unable to believe what actually did happen, and simply believed he was having a mental breakdown, where was there compassion? What about the marriage vows of honoring your spouse in sickness and health? Roy never threatened his family, and there was no reasonable grounds for her to claim that she had to leave to protect her life or the life of their children. If Roy had been diagnosed with cancer and his family behaved the same way, there’d be no debate that the wife’s choices were abominable. When Roy faced the biggest challenge of his life, his wife cut and ran as fast as she could.

Maybe because we’re both big fans of stories with supernatural twists, my wife and I discussed this more than once during our courtship. What would we do if one person thought they saw an alien, or some other unexplainable phenomenon? We both agreed that the bare minimum necessary was both compassion and immediate acceptance that the person who saw the thing believed that they saw something. We wouldn’t want to be the couple in movies that falls apart because one partner refuses to believe the other. We wouldn’t want to be the partner that has to go through a profound journey like this alone because they feel they can’t talk to anyone.

I vehemently disagree with Spielberg’s present day take on his early film. The film itself shows us two things very clearly: that Roy‘s wife breaks the marriage vow and his family leaves him, not the other way around; and that Roy is serving as a representative of governments of the Earth, representing his species in a calling that is bigger and vastly more important than any of his obligations as an individual.
 

Kyle_D

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I disagree with you (and Spielberg) and look at it as Roy has been chosen to do something that no human in history has done. He's making the sacrifice of a piece of his life and being with his family and that sacrifice will further mankind's knowledge of the beings that we share the galaxy with.
I vehemently disagree with Spielberg’s present day take on his early film. The film itself shows us two things very clearly: that Roy‘s wife breaks the marriage vow and his family leaves him, not the other way around; and that Roy is serving as a representative of governments of the Earth, representing his species in a calling that is bigger and vastly more important than any of his obligations as an individual.

Roy is not consciously sacrificing anything in the finale. He's so far down a psychological rabbit hole that he's not thinking about his family, his country, the good of mankind, or, frankly, even himself. He's just giving another scratch to an obsessive itch. Analogizing Roy to a soldier who makes a choice to sacrifice for his country does not work at all for me because Roy is not making a choice. A more appropriate analogy would be to an addict who alienates his family and thereafter overdoses with a smile on his face.

I also strongly disagree that his wife breaks any marriage vows, that she "abandons" him, or that Roy's family is somehow the villain of the film. Roy checks out from the family well before they leave. Even during the first scene in the Neary household, before the aliens show up in Muncie, Roy treats his family like a ball and chain, and he presumptuously expects them to want to do whatever he wants to do. He's a self-absorbed man-child from the beginning. By the time Ronnie walks out, Roy is behaving erratically, he's lost his job, he shows no interest in regaining employment to provide for his family, he's trashing the house, he's destroying his neighbors' property, he's scaring his kids, and Ronnie makes a justifiable decision as a mother to get her children away from him before he can inflict further psychological and emotional harm on them.

It's one of my all-time favorite films, but as I get older, the more I realize that it's a tragedy told as a fairy tale.
 

Colin Jacobson

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I don't like any of the endings to this movie. The story climaxes when the ship lands and Roy sees the aliens descend the ramp, thus validating his obsession and everything he's done. Let the John Williams score swell up and cut to credits right there, and it'd be a nearly perfect film.

Whether you see the interior of the ship or not, having Roy abandon his family to take a joyride on the spaceship crosses the line from Roy being a complicated character to being a loathsome one. What an a'hole. Especially when we've already seen his new aliens buds ripping an innocent child away from its mother's arms for reasons we will never know.

That last sentence ignores that Barry is far from an unwilling "abductee".

He seems delighted by the aliens' presence and shows no reluctance when they come for him.

Barry seems to get the aliens just want him to chill with them for a short while and he'll go home.
 

JoshZ

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That last sentence ignores that Barry is far from an unwilling "abductee".

He seems delighted by the aliens' presence and shows no reluctance when they come for him.

Barry seems to get the aliens just want him to chill with them for a short while and he'll go home.

This isn't a Close Encounters thread, so I don't want to belabor this too much, but you're talking about a toddler. He doesn't have the intellectual capability of making decisions like that for himself. His mother was clearly frantic about losing him.

Also, define "short while." The aliens had been holding onto WWII airmen for decades before releasing them at the end.
 

Colin Jacobson

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This isn't a Close Encounters thread, so I don't want to belabor this too much, but you're talking about a toddler. He doesn't have the intellectual capability of making decisions like that for himself. His mother was clearly frantic about losing him.

Also, define "short while." The aliens had been holding onto WWII airmen for decades before releasing them at the end.

As mentioned above, Barry should be terrified by the events. 3-year-olds freak out if they get separated from their parents, yet this kid's like "this is awesome!"

You work on the assumption they were unwilling "captives". Ever think that maybe they were happy to stay with the aliens?
 

Bryan Tuck

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This is still an E.T. thread, isn't it?

You never know; someday Disney may buy Universal and Columbia (or heck, all of Sony) and fold all their respective IPs into its mega-multiverse. E.T. and the Close Encounters aliens will get some Jedi training and team up to battle Galactus or something.

I'm glad the (mostly) original version of E.T. has become the standard one these days, but I guess it'd be nice if the 2002 cut was made available in at least HD. It does have some historical significance.
 
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