As wondrous as it is watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind now, the experience in 1977 must have been tinged with anxiety. From the opening scene where the lost squadron of World War II fighters is found in the Mexican desert, sans pilots, to the abduction of the child from a rural farmhouse, viewers probably wondered when the alien lightshow would end and the incinerating death rays would begin.
At the time there was next to nothing in our collective media consciousness to suggest that aliens could be motivated by something as innocent as curiosity; even the seemingly benign aliens in Star Trek often had ulterior motives (and most of the non-humanoids in Star Wars, which came out six months earlier, tended toward the nasty). Twenty-eight years after he pioneered the idea of the “good alien,” Steven Spielberg adapted the story that started the whole alien invasion trend in the first place, H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel “War of the Worlds.”
Posted by myownworstcritic 
