![]() ![]() ![]() Seeking the help of a psychiatrist, he recalls, while under hypnosis, his abduction at the pale hands of aliens.Ĭommunion is an odd, often surreal film, and the nature of Strieber’s encounters are frequently ambiguous. Returning from a weekend stay at his woodland cabin, Strieber is haunted by memories of strange lights and grey faces in windows. Memorable for its once groundbreaking CG depiction of a shiny flying ship, Flight Of The Navigator is a fun sci-fi romp (particularly if you were a nine-year-old boy in the 80s), despite the fact that its breezy second half can’t match up to the intriguing set-up of the first.Ĭhristopher Walken turns in an extraordinary, bizarre performance as author Whitley Strieber, in this adaptation of the writer’s apparently real account of extraterrestrial visitation. This being a Disney film, Flight Of The Navigator is high on cute aliens and low on disturbing experiments, and the latter half of the movie is essentially an excuse for its young hero to go for a joyride in a shiny alien spacecraft (which, incidentally, bears more than a passing resemblance to the ship in Hammer’s classic 1969 movie Quatermass And The Pit). A quick brain scan reveals that his brain is crammed full of star maps, placed there by his alien abductors, and that his lost eight years were the result of a faster than light journey to the distant planet, Phaelon. 12-year-old David (Joey Cramer) is knocked unconscious and wakes up to discover that eight years have passed. Spielberg’s aliens, despite their repeated, sinister kidnappings, are later revealed to be benign and oddly childlike, and the movie concludes with the abductees returned to Earth and Dreyfuss boarding a cathedral-like mothership, no doubt destined for adventures somewhere in a galaxy far, far away.Ī kind of junior Close Encounters, Flight Of The Navigator was Disney’s family-friendly rendering of an alien abduction story. Slowly building to a climax of almost religious proportions, Close Encounters features some stunning special effects courtesy of Douglas Trumbull (with Carlo Rambaldi on alien construction duties), and an unforgettable score by John Williams. Richard Dreyfuss stars as an electrical engineer who develops an unhealthy obsession with lights in the sky, and his sculpting of an oddly shaped mountain from mashed potato has been lampooned repeatedly since. The resulting movie, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, approached the subject of UFOs and alien abductions with a seriousness and sense of artistry that hasn’t been seen since.ĭisplaying echoes of Betty and Barney Hill’s experiences, the aliens in Close Encounters quietly abduct humans from all walks of life, including World War II fighter pilots (whose planes are later found abandoned in the Sonoran Desert) and a three-year-old boy (Cary Guffey). Following the financial success of Jaws, director Steven Spielberg took the risky step of remaking Firelight, a small low-budget movie he’d directed when he was just 16. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |