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Rating: You are free not to believe it, but on Debaser there will be at least 200 reviews of "The Dark Side of the Moon" and not even one of "E.T.", that is, one of the most famous and "profitable" movies of all time (it's the seventh-highest-grossing movie of all time, with 2,917,000,000 dollars at the box office). Honestly, who hasn't seen E.T.?
The movie, which came after a series of overwhelming successes ("Jaws", 1975; "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", 1977; "Raiders of the Lost Ark", 1981), is attributed to the intuition of Melissa Mathison, Spielberg's partner since 1980. Together, after an initial draft of a screenplay titled "Night Skies", and starting from an idea by Spielberg himself (the story of an imaginary friend in the dreams of a child who sees his parents divorce, an autobiographical theme since the divorce that happened in the Spielberg household many years before was a real shock for young Steven), they write what would become the starting basis for "E.T." (with the working title "E.T. and Me"). The idea for the character of the extraterrestrial lost on planet Earth is entirely Spielberg's, who asks his special effects team (led by the legendary Carlo Rambaldi) for a figure that resembles "a turtle without a shell" and that is as sweet and gentle as possible. The good alien, as already seen in "Close Encounters". Columbia, to whom Spielberg presents the script, rejects it, scornfully defining it as "a silly Walt Disney movie" (which then raises the question, what would be silly about Walt Disney movies remains a mystery), while Universal accepts and takes on the project.
The story is well known and not worth recounting. It's better to focus your attention on Spielberg's style, which is exceptional. Being a film that obviously lends itself to multiple interpretations (I consider it the most anti-racist film ever: a foreigner from far away lands on Earth and is only understood by those who still have a pure heart, that is, children, while adults, corrupted in soul and feelings, shun him or want to conduct strange scientific experiments on him), it is evident that the childish theme surpasses everything, and then Spielberg uses the camera at child height, rarely lifting it (often adults are only filmed from the waist down), and invents a series of sequences one more masterful than the other. It's impossible to cite them all, but some are monumental: E.T. drunk staggering in the bathtub; the famous bicycle flight destined to become one of the most powerful and imitated cinematic images of all time; and the scene, with parallel editing, where our alien stumbles home drunk while the young protagonist of the film dances in class with a hypothetical girlfriend while images of "The Quiet Man" by John Ford alternate on TV. Not to mention the ending, that "I will be right here" with the finger pointed at the heart meaning "don't lose the innocence of today and don't become like those adults around you" (childhood as something to be prolonged as much as possible, and Miyazaki, for one, has drawn much from "E.T.").
Spielberg, who had to juggle a predominantly young cast, shot, uniquely in his career, sequence by sequence in chronological order (in fact, increasing the initial budget). But the choice paid off:
"It helped us a lot because the kids emotionally knew where they were and wouldn't have had any idea where they would be the next day. So, like in real life, every day was a surprise. Their acting couldn't even be defined as such. It was more a reaction to the events" (Steven Spielberg)
Full of citations (from "Star Wars" to Disney, ending with role-playing games and comics), it is a film always on the brink of rhetoric and sugary sentimentality (as often happens with Spielberg) but never derails, always balanced and "on the level", able to narrate a popular and passionate America by blending it with high and noble themes like anti-racism and the horrors of growing up in pre-adolescence. Filled with an exhilarating enthusiasm (which owes much to the optimistic cinema, many years earlier, signed Frank Capra), it is a blockbuster with a soul, shot (and conceived) at a time when everything was going splendidly for Spielberg (the '80s were his Golden Age).
The proverbial line "E.T. phone home" and worldwide success, as was mentioned, crowned by 3 Oscars (best original score, yet another masterpiece by John Williams; best visual effects and best sound effects). It was briefly presented at the Venice Film Festival on the last day, out of competition, without much publicity, yet it was immediately understood that that film could have conquered box offices around the world (but perhaps the senior figures of that festival in the Lagoon did not understand it).
In 2002, Spielberg released a highly questionable large version on DVD. Of large, it actually had little: 4 more minutes (a couple of close-ups of the alien, the ship's flares more vivid, and the initial escape through the fields slightly longer). The questionable part was that, having occurred after September 11, a few months earlier, some dialogues were redubbed, replacing the word "terrorist" with "hippie" (?!), and the police officers instead of usually carrying guns held incredible (and moreover outdated) walkie-talkies. Not only that: the protagonist Elliott, in the original, refers to his brother with the rather unkind phrase "penis breath", the new edition censors everything. In the only unreleased sequence, the toothpaste tube used by E.T. is so digital (and fake) that it even makes the least sophisticated viewer laugh. The Italian edition dubs everything again, reaching the limits of indecency. In short, how to ruin a classic (but there would be countless examples in this regard).
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