I was not aching to see Close Encounters, especially since I had disliked the previous work of its director, Steven Spielberg. His first feature, The Sugarland Express, had seemed facile, fake-honest naturalism. His second, Jaws, was made for one purpose, to scare, and flopped with me because it was so clumsily done. I was utterly unprepared for this third kind of close encounter with Spielberg. I was particularly unprepared for the last 40 minutes of this 135-minute film, in which two things happen. First, and less important, the SF film reaches its pinnacle to date. Second, the movement of SF as vicarious religion and the movement of (what I've called) the Film Generation meet, unify, and blaze.

The script, written by Spielberg, is not much. It's like a 19th-century opera libretto: it serves as an armature, with some passable and some feeble devices, on which to string a progressive...