It didn't work for me as a kid, and as an adult I think I know why

Rating: 4/10 (9 September 2014)

As a young kid in the early 1990s, I could not get enough "Indiana Jones." I'm fortunate that my parents let me watch "Jaws," and I loved it. Seeing "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" at a friend's house left lasting images and ideas in my mind. But "E.T." did nothing for me, despite the fact that it was in theory Spielberg's most child-oriented blockbuster. When I saw it for the first and (until now) only time, I was the same demographic as the child star, but the experience was, frankly, boring. I remember feeling, if not putting into words, that the movie with the boy and the inarticulate, Yoda- like puppet was slow and cold. It was far less engaging to me than the other Spielberg titles to which I had been exposed. I don't remember if I knew that they were products of the same director, but the art of movies, which Ebert compared to "a machine that generates empathy," a tool for looking at the world through different eyes, was working on me: I was already accustomed to relating to adults on screen instead of just kids. Whatever holes "E.T." might have filled for me as a nascent movie buff were already occupied by more "grown-up," and therefore more exciting, material. If I was in the mood for pure fun with a sci-fi flavor, the "Star Wars" VHS tapes with their more attention-grabbing special effects and attention-keeping pace were right there. It was no contest.
Revisiting "E.T." now, I don't see much cause to regret my early rejection of it. In fact, it's probably worse now, because it's hard to find an original cut; I had to watch the ill-advised digital remaster, in which certain camera positions no longer make sense, and the actors are often looking just behind E.T. instead of at him as they presumably did when he was a puppet instead of pixels. Even ignoring the awkwardness of the digital content, which really does great damage to the feel and persona of the title character, there's little in "E.T." that feels real or fresh. The first part of the film takes place mainly in the home of the boy Elliott. The house always seems dim on the inside, lit by late afternoon sun even when it's midday outside. Elliott makes an emotional connection with the alien almost too easily, aided by an unexplained psychic connection between the two, and he causes some chaos with frogs in a heavy-handed scene that Spielberg seems determined to cram with ideas never to be unpacked.
Elliott and his older brother are bland, generic kids, and they gang up on their young sister, who is a breath of fresh air and a splash of color around the edges of the increasingly disturbing main story. It's not just that Drew Barrymore is cute in the role; she's also a natural actor, stealing scenes from all her older costars plus the alien. Having a real live Barrymore on their hands, you'd think the filmmakers would have rethought the whole thing and cast her as E.T.'s main companion. It's her, after all, who teaches E.T. his most important vocabulary words and figures out what he wants to do: "phone home."
The final act takes an unsatisfying route to this conclusion with a messily-edited, illogical home invasion by astronauts that segues into a dark riff on the massive government operation from "Close Encounters." It's a nightmarish cycle of silly and sad and shrill right up to the final scene, but there are two particular moments that do work. These are the iconic bicycle flights, one eclipsing the moon and the other the sun, and they are made magical and memorable with the help of John Williams's accompanying score. I might appreciate these moments more now than I did as a kid, having seen them depicted in Spielberg's production logo over the years and developed a fondness for the idea of them. But all things considered, I still think I made the right decision years ago to watch "Star Wars" a fifteenth time instead of "E.T." a second.