He should have stayed at home.

Rating: Null/10 (9 February 2002)

In "The Silence of the Lambs" Hannibal Lechter memorably said "you must ask of each thing-what is it,in itself?". Applying this to E.T., the plot is is basically that someone gets left behind by his friends and has to contact them to come back for him.Doesn"t sound very promising,does it? Well it isn"t,and E.T. like "Star Wars" is one of those movies which masquerade as Science Fiction whist playing to an audience who would run away from the real thing. Stephen Spielberg,who appears to have [literally] "lost the plot" after CE3K, once admitted that E.T. was based on the Martian in "The War Of The Worlds"[1953] and if you watch that classic movie you"ll find that the only real alteration he made was to give E.T. a huge pair of blue eyes to appeal to the kiddie audience the movie was aimed at! Everything else in the movie was sugar coated frippery to appeal to the mass audience and barely deserves a mention. Two thoughts occur to me though; why didn"t E.T.s fellow aliens realise he was missing and return for him? and since nobody destroyed his "telephone" why didn"t the authorities use it to contact the aliens? Like many people the hype surrounding this movie suckered me into seeing it in 1983 and i remember staggering out into Leicester Square thinking "i could have bought 3 pints instead of seeing that"! 4/10.