Richard Dreyfuss stars as cable worker Roy Neary, who along with several other stunned bystanders experience a close encounter of the first kind – witnessing UFOs soaring across the sky. After this life-changing event, the inexplicable vision of a strange, mountain-like formation haunts him. He becomes obsessed with discovering what it represents, much to the dismay of his wife and family. Meanwhile, bizarre occurrences are happening around the world. Government agents have close encounters of the second kind – discovering physical evidence of extraterrestrial visitors in the form of a lost fighter aircraft from World War II and a stranded military ship that disappeared decades earlier only to suddenly reappear in unusual places. Roy continues to chase his vision to a remote area where he and the agents follow the clues that have drawn them to reach a site where they will have a close encounter of the third kind – contact.
Source: Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (Director’s Cut)
About the Movie
Something is moving through the world’s skies. A squadron of planes missing since 1945 is found in the Mexican desert, intact and empty of explanation. In Indiana, electrical lineman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) has a nighttime encounter that burns the side of his face — a light, a sound, a certainty he cannot shake — and begins, like scattered people all over the world, to obsess over the image of a strange flat-topped mountain he has never seen.
As Neary’s obsession destroys his family life, a French scientist (François Truffaut) follows the same clues from the other side: a five-note musical phrase, repeated everywhere, that turns out to be a language. Both roads lead to Devils Tower, Wyoming, where the government has built a landing strip in secret — and where the visitors, in one of the most celebrated finales in cinema, come down to talk in music and light.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters changed the emotional register of science fiction. After a decade of dystopias, it proposed that contact with the unknown might be wondrous rather than terrifying — that the aliens might come to communicate, not conquer — and audiences responded on a massive scale. Its portrayal of UFO phenomena drew directly on real case research (astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who coined “close encounter,” consulted and cameos), Douglas Trumbull’s effects redefined what the uncanny could look like, and the five-note conversation between humanity and the mothership remains the genre’s defining image of first contact. Nearly every hopeful alien-arrival film since, including Arrival, lives in its light.
Where to Watch
Watch the Director’s Cut FREE on YouTube (free with ads, from YouTube Movies): Watch the full film FREE on YouTube.
