When Steven Spielberg made E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial he described the film as a reflection of his childhood and the epitome of his inner child. The story of the film is nothing overly complex, but that is the point. The story of a young boy, Elliot (Henry Thomas), befriending an alien, and making him a part of his family with his older brother Michael (Robert MacNaughten) and younger sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore), is one everyone knows and loves.
But what about a new generation of movie fans? Would E.T. still have the same effect on them? The film is a timeless classic and with its 40th anniversary approaching, I wondered whether now was the right time was to show the movie to my own children.
When you fall in love with movies, chances are at some point you fell in love with the movie experience. The beautiful darkness of a movie theater, the buttery smell of the popcorn at the tip of your fingers, and of course, the idea that you are being shipped to another world on the screen. As we get older that experience still resonates with us, but we also start understanding our love of film in a deeper way. We begin to see ourselves on screen and find characters who represent us or different people in our lives. We begin to see other people and other cultures that may not be a part of our lived experience and gain a small amount of understanding about how other people live.
When we revisit movies from our childhood all these things combine to give us a deeply personal experience. For many, E.T. is the movie that is a huge part of that lived movie experience. There was no way when I showed this movie to my own children, I could let it fall under the banner of “an old movie that dad liked, that he’s making us watch.” This was E.T., one of the seminal films of the 1980s and a movie that still influences filmmakers today. If you show them the movie at too young of an age, the slower pacing of the movie could turn them off for good. If they watch the movie at an older age, the childhood charm of the movie might lose all its effect.
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Both of my daughters grew up with early Disney movies and the endless cycle of Cinderella to Snow White to Frozen. For a long stretch there wasn’t a time when you would enter my house that you didn’t hear “Let it Go” in the background. Now older, 8 and 10 years old respectively, their movie tastes have changed, but they are part of a generation of movie goers who lack the patience of an older generation. They are used to action happening from the very beginning of a movie and the idea of credits rolling at the start of a movie is foreign to them. Introducing E.T. to them was going to be a challenge in my mind.
Nevertheless, I darkened the room, turned up the volume and got the popcorn ready.
Sitting nervously with them, I did my best to focus my attention on the movie and not look for their reaction, but I couldn’t help it. Their eyes opened wide at the same time mine did. They surfed the emotional waves of the movie, laughed at the funny parts, looked with amazement at what was happening on screen, and were fully invested in the relationship between Elliot and E.T. My concerns that this new generation of film goer would not fall in the love with the movie proved to be unfounded. While it is easy to say that the movie is "timeless" and just leave it at that, there is more to uncover when it comes to E.T’s appeal some 40 years later.
E.T. is a movie that is built on relationships. Elliot and his family feel like real people, who are going through their everyday lives attempting to find happiness with each other. While E.T. acts as a relationship surrogate for Elliot’s father in the movie, the deepness of their friendship was something my oldest daughter could relate to. She’s at an age where she’s developing close friendships with the people around her and doing so on her own. She truly understands what it means to have a best friend, and the comfort that comes from that special relationship. For my youngest, E.T. himself represented the possibility to wonder that she still firmly believes in. She saw herself in Gertie, who first looked at E.T. with some fright but then developed a tender relationship with him. While she might not admit with her big sister in the room, I could tell that for my youngest, she firmly believed that there was a small chance E.T. could visit her and something marvelous could happen.
From a scene-by-scene perspective, the film is a classic because of how it presents smaller events on an equal scale with the bigger, more memorable ones. The family sitting around the dinner table bickering in a loving way is something that is not only relatable but an affirming truth of being in a loving family. Emotions can run high at the dinner table, and it gives the audience an authentic experience in a movie described as fantastical. When their mother Mary (Dee Wallace) hears something upstairs and opens the closet to find E.T., hiding amongst the kids' collection of stuffed animals, everyone’s childlike dream that one day our toys may come to life is realized. When E.T. spends the day at home and gets drunk, the laughter in the room was audible and as his connection with Elliot becomes united, so does ours with the film’s characters. The emotional scenes of E.T. being sick and the legendary bike rescue scene tug on all our emotions in a very real way because of how the movie paces everything out. This is not only a credit to Spielberg’s directing but Melissa Mathison’s screenplay, which doesn’t try to outdo itself, instead letting the film’s natural wonder build at a normal pace.
For my daughters, their film world has been inundated with CGI effects. This of course has made the spectacular come to life in ways previous generations weren’t afforded, but it has also made things seem less authentic. As great as today’s effects are, there’s a boundary placed on them. They can create a world from a green screen, but the audience is very aware that there is a green screen. This is what separates E.T. from today’s films. The lovable alien looks like he belongs the world Spielberg created as opposed to an added effect that was placed in the movie months later. Academy Award-winning special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi created the creature with over the course of six months and $1.5 million. Rambaldi and his team of actors, mechanical puppets and voice actors worked tirelessly to create a real experience for the actors, and this translates to the audience in the most authentic way possible. Many of today’s best actors are reacting to events in movies that they don’t see, causing a small rift in the viewing experience for everyone involved. Because E.T. himself looks real, and for all intended purposes is real, my daughters weren’t forced to pretend that what they were seeing was real; it was for them a completely genuine viewing experience.
Now the question is, is this the summer I show them Jaws?