Stars: Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Francois Truffaut, Bob Balaban, Roberts Blossom, Cary Guffey, Lance Henriksen, Warren Kemmerling, Carl Weathers, Pat McNamara, Lance Henriksen

Director: Steven Spielberg

Summary: A repairman witnesses a close encounter with an alien ship from a far off world and then becomes obsessed by the strange craft.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND is Steven Spielberg's extraordinary film about a man named Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) who becomes obsessed with meeting extraterrestrials after encountering a UFO on an abandoned road one night. Against the wishes of his wife (Teri Garr) and children, Neary, along with another witness to the sighting (Melinda Dillon), travels to a mysterious mountain where the government has built a landing strip hoping to attract the aliens. Director Francois Truffaut costars as Claude Lacombe, one of the organizers of the project. Spielberg hoped to follow up the huge success of JAWS with a low-budget film that would be an easy shoot, but, thanks in part to the complicated special effects, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS quickly snowballed into being an expensive endeavor but a commercial and artistic success. No one who has seen the film has ever looked at a plate of mashed potatotes the same way again.

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Released in 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kindwas that year's cerebral alternative to Star Wars. It's arguably the archetypal Spielberg film, featuring a fantasy-meets-reality storyline (to be developed further in E.T.), a misunderstood Everyman character (Richard Dreyfuss), apparently hostile government agents (long before The X-Files), a sense of childlike awe in the face of the otherworldly, and a sweeping feel for epic film-making learned from the classic school of David Lean. Contributing to the film's overall success are the Oscar-winning cinematography from Vilmos Zsigmond, Douglas Trumbull's lavish effects and an extraordinary score from John Williams that develops from eerie atonality à laLigeti to the gorgeous sentiment of "When You Wish Upon a Star" over the end credits.

Not content with the final result, Spielberg tinkered with the editing and inserted some new scenes to make a "Special Edition" in 1980 which ran three minutes shorter than the original, then made further revisions to create a slightly longer "Collector's Edition" in 1998. This later version deletes the mothership interior scenes that were inserted in the "Special Edition" and restores the original ending.

On the DVD:CE3Kis packaged here with confusing documentation that fails to make clear any differences between earlier versions of the film and this "Collector's Edition"--worse, the back cover blurb misleadingly implies that this disc is the 1980 "Special Edition" edit. It is not. A gorgeous anamorphic widescreen print of Spielberg's 1998 "Collector's Edition" edit occupies the first disc: this is the version with the original theatrical ending restored but new scenes from the "Special Edition" retained.

The second disc rounds up sundry deleted scenes that were either dropped from the original version or never made it into the film at all--fans of the "Special Edition" can find the mothership interior sequence here. The excellent "making-of" documentary dates from 1997 and has interviews with almost everyone involved, including the director speaking from the set of Saving Private Ryan. Thankfully the superb picture and sound of the feature make this set entirely compelling and more than compensate for the inadequate packaging. --Mark Walker

Aspect Ratio:	2.35 Wide Screen, 16:9 Anamorphic Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	1977 Watch The Skies Featurette, The Making Of Documentary, 14 Deleted Scenes, Filmographies, Original Theatrical Trailer, Special Edition Trailer, Animated Menus
Subtitles:	Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, Turkish
Year:	1977
Release Date:	June 25, 2001
Runtime:	131 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	C D R 26501
Keywords:	Close, Two, General, Encounters, Third, Kind, Edition, Wide, Screen, Fiction, Science, Horror, Discs, Sci, Fi, Collector's
Genre:	Science Fiction