Most people love this but to me, it's trite

Rating: 4/10 (20 March 2016)

I remember back in 1982 when E.T. came out, I was very young and most probably the target audience for this movie. I recall going over to a neighbour's house and watching it on pirate video (I think that E.T. was the most pirated video ever). I was pretty excited to see it. In the event my neighbours all were in floods of tears, as I sat there strangely, yet deeply unimpressed with what I had just seen. I don't know what it is but I have revisited this film again a further couple of times in the last three years or so and I still come away somewhat ambivalent and unmoved. Maybe I am dead behind the eyes? I must be going by the reaction most people seem to have to this movie. But I can't change my reaction no matter how I try and find this to be overly sentimental and slightly tiresome. It's not that I don't like Steven Spielberg – I think on his day he can be great – but he sometimes makes films so twee in nature as to be very off-putting.
It also sort of baffles me how E.T. himself can be such a super-intelligent being when he allows himself to be led up a staircase by a child via a line of sweeties. That surely is the behaviour of a creature with an IQ no greater than a domestic dog and not a galaxy-hopping alien, surely? And why hasn't his alien race invented clothing? We have people on earth who go out in public in the nude but we throw them in prison on the grounds of mental illness.