Weighty and more than substantial piece flicking through a great deal of emotional substance, on top of what is a magical, creative science fiction drama.

Rating: 7/10 (3 August 2011)

Aliens. Beings from outer space – touching down on planet Earth with the intent to do whatever they please. Such films with the above premise, indeed any premise revolving around human-beings coming into contact with extra terrestrials, we often find are always so much more interesting when they come to socially, rather than aggressively, intermingle with that of the Earth's inhabitants. We enjoy films such as Robert Wise's original The Day the Earth Stood Still and the recent Peter Jackson funded District 9 a whole lot more than we do, say, Transformers or Independence Day – films about creatures with the ability to journey as far as they can but with nary a lot else to do than reduce Earth to rubble. Somewhere in the midst of all of this lies Spielberg's 1982 film E.T., a film, like the best of the above examples, about an alien creature not coming to Earth with the necessity to destroy it, but to carry a message or explore or, in the titular character's case, desire to make contact.
When E.T. begins, it launches itself quietly; ominously and in the mould of Ridley Scott's Alien from a few years previously, as this suspicious glance across the starry night sky to ghostly musical tones dominate proceedings. The set up for an uncanny, fearful representation as we uneasily look up beyond the stars at the unknown appears prominent; the camera tilting downwards revealing a dense Californian forest fore-bearing the literal physical movement that the space ship which eventually arrives will undertake. Out of the ship arrives a flurry of small creatures, shot anonymously as we struggle to focus on them for all the fern and low light. One little fella gets overly curious, gazing long fully over a nearby town from this position on a hill-top having wondered away from his ilk. He appears humble; his kind clearly have the technology to kick something undesirable off with our species but instead gather samples of plants and such, his pensive body language has him appear fearful of us rather than the other way around.
Chaos arrives with the coming of some humans; shot equally anonymously in their charging and rushing through the forest, they come via a bevvy of 4x4 trucks whose arrival counterbalances that of the ship's smooth descent. They explore, finding our little creature and give chase; their flashlights juxtaposing this being's increasingly glowing red chest. It stumbles and fumbles to get back to its friends, whom are readying to leave, and thus, we find ourselves going against our own kind and rooting on this little being to make it back. But it is too late: the ship departs without him and the cluster of men eventually go on to loose their target. Within that aforementioned town dwells young Elliot (Thomas), a boy living with his bigger brother Michael (MacNaughton) and younger sister Gertie (Barrymore) alongside their divorced mother in a neat, suburban neighbourhood.
When we first observe Elliot, it is on a recreational summer evening with Michael and a few of his friends while they play a board game; Elliot attempts to join in, but is marginalised and kept at bay – a later meeting out in the garden with our space man, whose trundled down from the hills, the catalyst leading Elliot to explore what is, to him, the unknown, just as everything around him is to this space creature. The film branches out into a wondrous, deeply affecting drama about the lead being able to find a proverbial level with a organism after having been marginalised during the board game and by those at school. Tied into proceedings is the thriller aspect consisting of the government agents doing their utmost to find E.T., the strand doing well to maintain tension as these rather defenceless children slowly come to bond with what is the agent's prize whilst the net, unbeknownst to them, closes in.
The notion of E.T.'s rejection of the more aggressively inclined, less humble-a being that he is, is a sentiment beautifully, cheekily even, captured in Elliot's bedroom when the boy raises a Boba Fett plastic toy in front of that of E.T. The toy, of the Lucas-film variety, is identified by Elliot as a creature more preoccupied with blasting away at other beings; something epitomising a more shallow-a depiction of aliens that are additionally identified within the comment as being much more rife in popular culture. In having Elliot hold the toy up in the manner he does, E.T. standing in the background but still dominating the frame, Spielberg literally dwarfs this toy in comparison to his bigger; more predominant idea of what should constitute as a filmic alien: Spielberg's is a lot more interesting. The film is a cracking, rollicking adventure; a notion in spite of the fact it rarely gets outside of a quaint suburban home based in one of those bright, perky American estates. It is a film full of a great deal of emotional involvement and heady attachment to the characters, human or otherwise, therein; a film doing its utmost to cover that of a group of siblings cut apart by the divorce of their parents and their consequent realignment through this wondrous catalyst that is the falling to Earth of a space-creature. Consumatley made, imperiously acted by the child-performers and wonderfully tactile in its tonal shifts from coming of age to chase thriller to comedy, E.T. hits most, if not all, of the notes it goes for.