E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) — The Visitor

0:03 Calaruga Shark Media. Last time we talked about a man who couldn't stop looking at the sky. This time the sky looks back. Suburban California, nineteen eighty two. A ten year old boy named Elliot is alone in the backyard at night, investigating a noise in the shed. Something moves in the dark. He throws a baseball into it. It throws the baseball back, and Steven Spielberg does something no science fiction film had ever quite done before. He puts the camera at a child's eye level, keeps it there for the entire film, and trusts that everything you need to understand about the universe can be seen from three and a half feet off the ground. This is Spielberg reloaded episode two e t The Extraterrestrial nineteen eighty two.

1:08 Close Encounters asked what it would feel like to encounter something beyond our understanding? Et asks a quieter stranger question, what if the thing beyond our understanding just wanted to go home. Spielberg had been carrying the idea since the late seventies. A more intimate companion to Close Encounters set not in the desert or the sky, but in a tract house in the San Fernando Valley. Where Close Encounters was about adult obsession, this would be about childhood loneliness. Where that film ended with a man walking toward the unknown, this one would end with something walking away from it.

1:54 The Extraterrestrial was released in June nineteen eighty two. Written by Melissa Matheson and directed by Spielberg, the film follows Eliot, played by Henry Thomas, a ten year old living with his mother and two siblings after his father has left the family. Eliot discovers an alien botanist accidentally stranded on Earth. When his ship departs without him, the two form a bond. Eliot hides e T in his room. His older brother and younger sister are let in on the secret their mother is not. What follows is a film about friendship across an impossible distance, about the specific loneliness of childhood, and about what it means to love something you know you're going to lose. It is also quietly one of the saddest films Spielberg ever made. The decision to shoot almost entirely from the children's perspective was not just a stylistic choice, It was a moral one. Adults in e t are shot from the waist down until the final act.

2:57 They are forces, presences, threats. They are not seen as full human beings because Eliot doesn't see them that way. The film earns its emotion by committing absolutely to its point of view. Henry Thomas's audition for the role is one of the more remarkable pieces of footage in Hollywood history. He was asked to improvise a scene about losing a pet. What he produced reduced the casting room to silence. Spielberg reportedly knew almost immediately he had found Elliott. The performance in the finished film is continuous with that audition, raw unguarded completely without the self consciousness that ruins most child performances.

3:39 E t himself was designed by Carlo Rambaldi, who had worked with Spielberg on Close Encounters. The creature is genuinely strange. The neck extends, the chest glows, The eyes are deep and old and somehow kind. He shouldn't be sympathetic. The engineering of your sympathy toward him is one of the film's central technical achievements, and it works because Spielberg and Rambaldi never let you forget that Et is genuinely alien. He isn't cute in a safe way. He's odd and a little frightening, and you love him anyway. That tension is what makes him real. The film's emotional logic rests on the bond between Eliot and e T, which Spielberg establishes through parallel cutting and eventually through a literal psychic connection.

4:28 The two feel what the other feels, share emotions across species. It's an idea that could have been clumsy, even silly. Instead, it becomes the film's most devastating structural decision, because when e T begins to die, Eliot begins to die with him. John Williams wrote the score, his third consecutive collaboration with Spielberg after Jaws and Close Encounters. The main theme is one of the most recognized pieces of film music ever written, but what Williams did underneath the surface of the film is equally important. He composed the score in real time to a locked cut, adjusting tempo and rhythm to match the images frame by frame. Spielberg was so dependent on Williams's music in the finale that he eventually re edited parts of the bicycle chase sequence to match the rhythm of the score. Rather than forcing the score to match the existing cut. The music doesn't accompany that moment, it carries it. ET was released into a specific cultural moment.

5:42 The early nineteen eighties were years of divorce, rates climbing, of children growing up in households split by separation, of a generation learning to make sense of absence. Elliott's father is never seen in the film. He's in Mexico with another woman. His name comes up once briefly, and then it's dropped. Elliot doesn't talk about it. He doesn't have to. His loneliness is already visible in every scene. Spielberg has said that e T was partly about his own parents divorce when he was a teenager, about the specific grief of a child who can't fix what's broken in his family. That grief runs under the entire film. E T doesn't just fill Elliot's loneliness. He becomes the repository for it, the friend who listens, the presence in the room that makes the darkness less dark, which is why the film's third act lands the way it does when e T is captured by the government scientists, when his body fails and his chest stops glowing, and Elliott screams at the men in hasmat suits that he was ours. Spielberg is not making an adventure film anymore. He is making a film about loss, about the specific, vertigenous feeling of watching something you love disappear from the world. The sequence where Et dies or appears to die was controversial at test screenings.

7:05 Audiences were devastated. Some felt the film had gone too far. Spielberg kept it He was right because the resurrection that follows e T's revival, the escape on bicycles, the goodbye in the forest only works because the loss was real. You can't earn the ending without paying for it. Spielberg understood this in a way that most filmmakers working in the same register do not. Sentiment without grief is just manipulation. The film earns its tears because it made you pay for them. First, Et became the highest grossing film in history at the time of its release, surpassing Star Wars.

7:45 It held that record for eleven years until Jurassic Park, another Spielberg film, took it. The numbers are staggering, but the cultural impact was deeper than any box office figure. The image of Elliott and Et silhouetted against the moon on a flying bicycle became one of the defining images of twentieth century American cinema. It appeared on posters, on lunchboxes, in commercials, in the Ambulin Entertainment logo, where it remains to this day, a single frame that somehow contains the whole feeling of the film. But the film's legacy is not just commercial or visual. It changed what people believed a science fiction film could be about. Before ET, science fiction was largely the province of ideas of technology, of threat and spectacle. After ET, it could be about a child sitting in a dark room with something strange and gentle and frightened, and neither of them knowing quite what to do next. Spielberg would spend the next forty years moving between the two poles that close encounters and e t established wonder that costs something and connection that ends.

8:59 Nearly every film film he made is in conversation with one of those two ideas, but he never made another film quite like this one. Et exists at a specific intersection of autobiography, technical mastery, and emotional nakedness that he only hit once. He was thirty five years old when it was released. There's Something in it that could only have been made by someone who still remembered exactly what it felt like to be ten years old and certain that the adults had gotten everything wrong. Next time we turn the lights off, the same unknown that brought wonder in Close Encounters and friendship in et comes back one more time, and this time it comes to destroy everything.

9:43 War of the Worlds What happens when the universe stops being curious about us and starts being hungry. Yeah,