Without the steely perfection or visual profundity of [Stanley] Kubrick's 2001, Spielberg's rousing entertainment [Close Encounters of the Third Kind] is easily the next most impressive venture in the film art of science fiction. Kubrick was out for apocalypse, Spielberg only for epiphany. Yet more is revealed than the cosmic visitation, for even more obviously than in Kubrick's masterpiece, Close Encounters offers a multiple comment on the genre in which Spielberg is working, the gifts he brings to it and their imaginative nurture in other genres, other film and fictional outlets for the imagination. The most resolutely popular of the successful young directors has given us the apotheosis of his own devoted audience, his Everyman, with the ordinary middle-American men and women whom we see struggling to shape the form of their destiny and that of their planet emerging as the director's personal stand-ins….
Almost a decade after 2001, Spielberg's film continues to acknowledge the ways science fiction taps directly the springs of cinema: technological kinesis, simulated environments, imaginary vistas made visible. With its brilliant flooding and blacklighting, especially in the blanching inferno of cosmic irradiation at the end, Spielberg's movie also draws self-evidently upon the sine qua non of film imagery. The movie at its transfiguring extravagant climax is a 'film-within-the-film' in nothing so much as its spectacular lambency. The aliens announce themselves in light; all but invisible in the brilliance of their own aura, like seraphic presences, they are also what Stanley Kauffmann calls all film images: figures of light. Light plus sound to be exact: their double ambience, their medium. To the tune of a strange encoded melody, the aliens seem to come singing 'Fiat lux', summoning revelation from both the night sky and the darkened screen that projects it, each a visionary's tabula rasa….
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