Good movie, but not as great as I remember it

Rating: Null/10 (1 April 2015)

Like most people, I first saw this film as a little child. I think I had just learned to read so I could follow the subtitles. And it was great. Childhood hijinks, bizarre aliens, chases, toys, skipping school to hang with your new friend, getting drunk (yeah...), making excuses to your mom, distrusting adults, high adventures and grand plans. What's not to like?
But now, as I rewatched it for the first time as an adult, it just didn't grab me as well as it did. It's still an interesting movie and certainly iconic on every level, from visuals to the characters to the story. But somehow it seemed hollow to me, like the story wasn't as deep as it needed to be to really pull us in. And that's a problem. It's a simple kid's story trying to function as a young adults movie. Not that kid's stories cannot be deep, of course they can, but they're usually rather simple in structure. Like E.T., which goes basically like this: boy finds something strange in the forest, he brings it home or it follows him home, he tries to hide it from his parents, they become the bestest of best friends, but eventually the boy has to release his new pet back into the wild because the pet is not meant to live with humans. Simple, allegoric, message-teaching. The problems start when you try to introduce the big bad government as the antagonists or you try to include scenes with sexual or alcoholic references. Because they stand out and they seem superfluous.
It still works, don't get me wrong. E.T. is a cultural classic for a reason. Sure, there's a certain amount of love it or hate it to the alien's creepy muteness, sure the children are rather clichéd, sure the mom's willful ignorance requires a lot of willing suspension of disbelief. But when it works, when the bike suddenly lifts from the air, when the children are completely enthralled by their new friends, when the alien craft lands on Earth. Then it's magic.
I theorize that E.T. works really well for you if you're a child yourself or if you want to be a child again. It's a great movie about childhood. Unfortunately as a twenty-something I don't really fall into either of those categories, so it didn't quite work for me right now.