4kUHD Blu-Ray/Movie Review: Close Encounters of the Third Kind 40th Anniversary Edition

 

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a 1977 film written and directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Richard Dreyfuss, Francois Truffaut, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban, and Melinda Dillon. It is the "other" late 1970s movie directed by Steven Spielberg, the other, of course, being Jaws. This movie was actually Spielberg's passion project that he wanted to make before Jaws, but he was able to secure financing for Jaws first, which then allowed him to make this movie. 

Close Encounters is a movie about aliens, essentially dramatizing all the alleged alien abductions and encounters that people claimed to have had back in the days before we were all walking around with cameras. And, it partly plays off distrust of the government after Watergate by involving a government cover-up. The movie is basically told from a couple of different perspectives. That of government agents who are discovering strange occurrences throughout the world (like finding planes that had been missing since the 1940s mysteriously reappearing), and then those of normal people who have encounters with alien ships.  In the film, Dreyfuss plays Roy Neary, an electrical worker who has one of the encounters with the ships while he is out trying to deal with power outages caused by the alien ships. He then becomes obsessed with trying to find the aliens, leading him to attempt to reach Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Dillon plays the mother of a child (played by Cary Guffey) who also has an encounter with the aliens and joins up with Roy to get to Devil's Tower.  

The 4K set is a three-disc set containing a UHD disc and two regular blu-ray discs. The UHD disc includes three different versions of the movie: the theatrical cut, an enhanced version that upgrades the special effects and makes some minor edits that Spielberg would have liked to do had he not been under a time crunch to finish the movie. Then there is a director's cut, which is essentially a different version of the enhanced version, omitting a scene that the studio wanted to include when they agreed to make the enhanced version, that Spielberg did not think should be included. Each version of the film is around the same length and tells the same story. Neither the enhanced cut nor the director's cut significantly alters the story. The UHD disc also allows you to play the enhanced and director's cuts of the film in a "View From Above" mode that provides details about the differences between the theatrical version of the movie and the version you are currently watching. 

The first regular blu-ray disc contains the same content as the UHD disc, and the second has the extras. There are well over two hours’ worth of extras, some of which were made sometime around 2016-2017 for the 40th anniversary of the movie, and others that were the original behind-the-scenes material shot around the time the movie was released. There are also deleted scenes, storyboard comparisons, a stills gallery, and the theatrical trailer. So, if you like going through extras, the physical discs are a good pickup. The A/V quality of the UHD disc is good, but I would not say I was blown away by the restoration. It does look significantly better than the standard definition footage shown in the extras, but the UHD format, especially in the theatrical edition, highlights the limitations of the 1977 special effects. 

Overall, the movie is good to very good. It is definitely a bit dated, and parts of it do not hold up all that well. You can definitely tell it was made in the late 1970s and has the look and feel of that period. Interestingly, in some of the newer bonus material, Spielberg said that he would not make the movie the same way today as he did back then, because of how his perspective changed as he got older. That said, it is definitely worth checking out.