ho-hum, technically amazing but emotionally not very involving.

Rating: 5/10 (21 February 2003)

i just caught this flick on video in hopes that maybe i would connect with it better than i did in the theater -no such luck. obviously spielberg is a brilliant director who technically is always pushing the edge and expanding the vocabulary of film itself, but like so many of his movies, this one left me empty emotionally. the characters never felt real, (which is not to say that the performances were bad), i never felt invested in them in any way. the director's films that i find most powerful were his early works like "jaws" & "close encounters"... where we did an amazing job of creating an american middle class reality, we recognized the people on the screen because they were just like our family, neighbors, ourselves... then he would introduce a supernatural element like a shark or space craft... and he had me. but what do i know. he is, after all, the king of the world -despite what james cameron might think.