A wonderful family movie

Rating: Null/10 (11 January 2004)

When Elliot hears strange noises from his garden shed he finds an alien there - left behind when it's craft had to leave early. He brings `ET' into the house and shows his siblings, who help ET feel at home and settled. However ET begins to plan a way to signal back home to get picked up, meanwhile Elliot and ET start to have their feelings join up.
Be honest - there must be very few people do at very least don't have a lump in there throats at some point during this film. The plot is a simple tale of an alien who befriends a young boy however it is told with such pathos and wit that it is very hard not to love it. Here is an example that shows that Spielberg can actually make a sweet film without totally killing it with syrupy sentiment - although that's not to say that he doesn't cut it very fine at times here. ET is an ugly little beast but he easily wins over an audience. His link to Elliot is never totally explained but it is well used, whether it's in the classroom scene or the touching scene near the end.
The film has a real wit to it that is never hilarious but sits very well with the gentle emotion of the film. Most of the reason lies with the cast. This is seen in the fact that in the 20th anniversary version of the film, several scenes were added with a cgi ET - they mostly added humour but didn't totally work because it is the very talented child cast that makes it work.
Thomas' Elliot is cute but not to the sickly point, he is sassy and smart (but again not to the point of being annoying). Barrymore does all the stuff she does now - little smirk and smart mouth! But she is really good and I wish more child actors could be as fun and natural as she was here. Ironically it is the eldest of the three children that is the weakest - he is a teenager and falls to the surely side, he is quite wooden for too much of the film. However it is ET who is the star of the film and, watching it as an adult now, it is amazing how expressive he is for a puppet - he may not look like much when viewed alongside modern cgi characters (ie Gollum) but he is very expressive and very much a character rather than an effect; Barrymore was not the only one to be taken in by him as a real character! In fact the cgi ET looks weaker if anything because he does look like an effect first and a character second; it's hard to describe but the puppet works better because he is in the scenes whereas the effect has clearly been added later.
Overall though this is a wonderful film that I saw as a child in a bingo hall cinema and loved and watch as an adult now and love. There is really very little that is wrong with it and Spielberg holds back the syrup for only a few scenes that are emotional enough to justify it. The cast of children show, where later Spielberg films don't, that child actors don't need to be horribly cutest kids that bare no resemblance to real life, and they create a real sense of audience involvement and identification as well as emotion and wit.