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An alien spacecraft has come to earth on the outskirts of a Los Angeles suburb, and its personnel are investigating the surrounding woods when they are interrupted by a group of men, apparently searching for them. One of their number is inadvertently left behind, and he takes shelter in the back garden of the nearest house. Ten-year-old Elliott, who lives there with his mother Mary (recently abandoned by her husband), older brother Michael and sister Gertie, believes he sees something but is pooh-poohed by his family. That night, he encounters the extra-terrestrial, and they both flee. Next day, Elliott searches the woods and leaves a trail of M&M candies, which eventually lead the hungry creature to his room. Elliott tries to make his guest at home, hiding him from Mary but introducing him to his brother and sister. "E.T." (who has already established a deeply empathetic relationship with Elliott) astounds them with feats of levitation, and eventually communicates that he would like to "phone home". The children collect odds and ends of equipment to help him build the necessary device, while the searchers in radio vans begin to close in. On Halloween, the children smuggle E.T. out of the house, and Elliott spends the night with him in the hills as he tries to communicate with his own people. Elliott, becoming ill himself as E.T. sickens in the alien climate, eventually returns home, whereupon the searchers, led by “Keys”, break into the house and set up equipment for reviving both the boy and the extra-terrestrial. Eventually, the sympathetic bond between the two is broken and Elliott recovers while E.T. apparently dies. But a message from 'home' restores him, and the delighted Elliott persuades Michael and their school friends to help transport him back to the woods, where the spacecraft returns and Elliott bids E.T. a sad farewell.

The first disappointment of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial - the latest variation on Steven Spielberg's phenomenal capacity for making the Most Successful Movie Ever - is that it indeed revives the child in all of us, but at the expense of the adult sense of wonder in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film on which it draws substantially and which is still Spielberg's best to date. It does this, in fact, with a literal amputation, since its most striking feature is that adult males are never shown above the midriff until nearly the end of the film, when we finally see the face of the man with the 'keys', encased in protective space-suiting and sinisterly lit from below. He then turns out to be a grown-up version of Elliott, or a grown-tall but arrested version, since he seems to have spent all his life searching for what Elliott has already found.

This truncating motif is curious, because it is the only thing in the film which relates to a possible thematic interest - aside from all the talk about the childhood capacity for wonder, the return to a cinema of dreams etc. - which might tie up an interest in childhood, autobiographical elements of Spielberg's, and a metaphorical as opposed to gosh-wow dimension to the film. Yet it remains in the end peculiarly unrewarding, unassimilated in the film's rush to its emotional climax, and looks in retrospect almost like a trick of animation (Spielberg's much-loved source of plastic invention). Elliott, like Spielberg, comes from a broken home, his father having recently left with another woman for Mexico (that favourite American escape hatch, apart from watching the skies). So the disappearance of his father becomes the graphic elimination of the male above a certain height - and drives Elliott to a secret companion, ageless and sexless, with whom he establishes such a deep sympathy that it threatens his life.

The re-emergence of the father at the eleventh hour - a father with the understanding of the boy - seems to redress the balance and is accompanied by much symbolic paraphernalia (swathes of plastic sheeting and womb-like tubing which cocoon the house). But the rebirth of E.T., the bikes-across-the-moon exultation as the children escape with a little levitation from the gun-toting grown-ups, and the virtual disappearance of "Keys" from this final section, hardly fill out the schema. Or rather, they fill it out by obliterating it with the high-spirited-kids-and-indestructible-families ethic of Disney. Not so alien to Disney, either, are the religious trappings of this sweet optimism: a mother called Mary, the resurrection of E.T., and then his revelation, robed in white, to his disciples (the kids on their bikes). The trappings confirm a more general undertone to the upbeat ending of Close Encounters, and rather undercut a recent Sight and Sound article (Autumn 1982) which claims that the liberating ethos of Spielberg's two S-F epics contains nothing of the religious. It might, on the contrary, be interesting to speculate how a nice Jewish boy got from The Ten Commandments as inspiration in Close Encounters to this New Testament flim-flam.

This is not to suggest that pessimism (say, Elliott having to give up E.T., the child-within-him, more completely than he does here) would inevitably be preferable to optimism. Just that there are puzzling, frustrating and finally evasive leaps in the film's optimism. Spielberg is ready to sacrifice any logic of plot or character, and certainly of theme, for his celebratory climax, and so can turn the search party led by "Keys" - who first drive the extraterrestrials away and then prowl the streets of this Erewhon suburb in their electronic eavesdropping vans - from an oppressively official presence to a liberatingly benevolent one at the end, without ever indicating what their exact function is. Such a switch also takes place in Close Encounters, and may be the result of the old-fashioned forms Spielberg likes using (his S-F plots embody 50s paranoia) coupled with his unfashionable love for all things contemporary, middle-class, suburban and echt American.

What sabotages E.T., however, seems to be a particular structural flaw. The project reportedly began as a small-scale film called After School, simply concerning children and "what you do between leaving school at three and having dinner at six". On to this the extra-terrestrial has been grafted, although the film remains relatively modest in scope and special effects. In some ways, however, it is more grandiose than Close Encounters, its emotional effects more random and overreaching. In the earlier film, for instance, John Williams' score only hit its Hitchcock-Herrmann stride as Richard Dreyfuss was racing towards the culmination of his vision at the Devil's Tower, here the music is pushing towards the same identification far too early, as Elliott sets out by bike to look for E.T. the morning after their first encounter. One suspects that the visionary material (more at home in Close Encounters) is having to ride roughshod over the thematic interest of After School (the broken home, the lonely child). And Spielberg, at his best, has been a director of complete visions (Duel, Close Encounters, 1941) not complicating themes. The primal conflict of Duel is not enhanced by the hero's telephone call to his wife which begins to suggest possible interpretations.

That E.T., in any event, is not about the world of children, is not even specifically a film from a child's point of view, is suggested by its strongest and most affecting sequence: E.T.'s abandonment at the beginning. So quickly is one made to see the world from his perspective - the fairy-tale splendour of the forest and the lights of the city spread out below - that when the searchers suddenly begin crashing in pursuit, they are made to seem like the alien intruders. Spielberg's talent for fantasy is so complete - the liberty he takes with our field of vision and sense of identification - that one wants to call it something else, a graphic re-invention of the world. Here it amounts to what might be experienced by anthropomorphised cartoon characters - Tom and Jerry, perhaps, playing in a world occupied by headless, harrying people, who interfere with their (and Spielberg's) delight in knocking over the furniture.

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