Stars: John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Charles Durning, Oliver Reed, Robby Benson

Director: John Herzfeld

Summary: Romantic comedy tale highlighting the coming together of a selfish young would-be inventor and a boorish young would-be actress.

After striking box office gold in "GREASE," John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John got together five years later for this romantic comedy. God throws his hands up at the foolishness of humanity and orders the race be destroyed by a second flood. A group of bleeding-heart angels strike a deal with him: if they can find just two good souls, the Lord will allow Earth to survive. Unfortunately, the angels have staked the future of the species on a thieving bank-teller and a con-artist!

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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:	16:9 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Year:	1983
Release Date:	April 5, 2004
Runtime:	84 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	01339 D V D
Keywords:	Comedy, Two, General, Kind, Wide, Screen
Genre:	Comedy