In the following essay, Engel asserts that Close Encounters of the Third Kind is primarily concerned with language in a variety of forms—“verbal, visual, electronic, and musical.”

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...

Almost everyone both in and out of [Close Encounters of the Third Kind] seems … to be waiting for some kind of miraculous salvation, an escape, an awakening, from the bad dream of social stagnation and middle-class malaise which the first half of Spielberg's movie so emphatically reminds us of. And we would probably all arise and go now … were it not for the film's sustained promise that soon, suspensefully soon, our questions will be answered, our emptiness will be filled, that ...

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the most innocent of all technological-marvel movies, and one of the most satisfying. This film has retained some of the wonder and bafflement we feel when we first go into a planetarium: we ooh and aah at the vastness, and at the beauty of the mystery. The film doesn't overawe us, though, because it has a child's playfulness and love of surprises…. [The intelligent creatures in the machines from outer space] are benevolent. They want to get to know...

Notice how [the film version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind] virtually stops once the giant mother ship arrives—half the shots are of people just standing there and staring. Their sense of wonder is what the movie is all about. The need, the anticipation, the whole sense of irresistible movement toward some goal is resolved when the mother ship looms into view. After that, the movie continues for another forty minutes, simply as a big clump of indulgence—like driving an hour to get a si...

I wish that Steven Spielberg had trusted his first instincts and left "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" as it was. In his new, reëdited version, "The Special Edition," he has made some trims, put in some outtakes, and shot a few new bits. But if you saw it before and loved it, you may be bothered all the way through—not just because you miss some of the scenes that he has taken out (you miss even what you didn't think was great) but because the slightly di...

Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind having been very well received by critics and mass audiences, [Spielberg] decided his latest feature, 1941, would be something entirely different—a comedy (the previous films were only unintentionally funny). So, keeping Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in mind, he began with a script … about the pandemonium in Los Angeles during the week after Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, the director never asked himself whether the par...

Steven Spielberg, the writer and director [of Close Encounters of the Third Kind] has re-edited some bits of the original, put in some footage that was omitted first time, and shot some new footage…. It's a mistake. The second encounter isn't as good as the first. One special power of Close Encounters, I thought … was that it exemplified a Dionysian attribute of film: the exaltation available through film's technology and, therefore, repeatable—at will, more or less...