E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Official trailer

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is Steven Spielberg’s 1982 American science fiction family film. The film depicts ten-year-old Elliott discovering an alien creature accidentally stranded in suburban California after his ship leaves without him. Elliott hides the creature in his bedroom, gradually introduces him to his older brother Michael and younger sister Gertie, and helps him construct a communicator to call his ship for rescue.

Government agents pursue the alien while Elliott attempts to protect him until the rescue can occur. Henry Thomas plays Elliott. Drew Barrymore plays Gertie.

Robert MacNaughton plays Michael. Dee Wallace plays the mother Mary. Peter Coyote plays the lead government scientist known as Keys. Pat Welsh, an elderly Marin County woman whose smoking-damaged voice produced the particular quality the character required, provided the voice of E.T. Melissa Mathison wrote the screenplay. Universal Pictures produced the film on a budget of approximately 10.5 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 800 million dollars worldwide.

E.T. can make a grown man cry and grin in the same ten minutes, and I’m the grown man. I think Spielberg never made anything purer. It’s a story about a lonely kid with a missing father who finds a friend, told with total sincerity and no winking at the adults in the room. I wouldn’t change a frame of it.

E.T. held the record for highest-grossing film of all time for eleven years until Jurassic Park (1993) surpassed it.

Few films achieve the cultural penetration E.T. delivered in 1982. The film became the highest-grossing American production of its decade and held the record for over a decade afterward. The combination of Spielberg’s direction, Mathison’s screenplay, John Williams’s score, and the central performances by Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore produced material that crossed every demographic and cultural boundary. Adults wept at screenings. Children memorized the dialogue. The film was nominated for nine Academy Awards including Best Picture. It won four including Best Original Score for John Williams.

The phone home line, the bicycle moon shot, and E.T.’s glowing finger have acquired cultural reference standing that few films can match. It’s Spielberg at his commercial and artistic peak.

The Children’s Performances

Henry Thomas was ten years old during production. Drew Barrymore was six. Robert MacNaughton was fifteen. The three children carried the dramatic content of the film alongside the puppet E.T. Spielberg’s working method with the young performers depended on shooting in chronological order so the children could develop their relationships with the puppet character in real time. It produced real emotional response that conventional production scheduling would have prevented.

Thomas’s audition for the role has become legendary. Spielberg asked the boy to remember a painful memory. Thomas thought about his recently deceased dog. The audition recording shows him crying real tears. Spielberg told him on the spot that he had the role. The performance maintained this emotional intensity throughout production. Drew Barrymore was reportedly told E.T. was a real alien instead of a puppet to maintain her real responses. The children’s belief in the situation produced the central emotional content that the surrounding adult production couldn’t have generated through technique alone.

Henry Thomas is the heart of this film for me. I believe every tear that kid cries, and Drew Barrymore’s Gertie steals every scene she’s in. Child performances usually make me wince. These three feel like real siblings, squabbling one minute and closing ranks the next.

The Suburban Setting

Spielberg set the film in an ordinary Southern California subdivision instead of anywhere exotic. The cul-de-sac, the tract houses, the school halls and the 1980s living rooms are where the alien turns up.

Putting something so strange against such ordinary backgrounds made the film instantly familiar, and audiences recognized their own neighborhoods. I think that’s the whole magic trick: the alien hides in a kid’s bedroom in a tract house, and the fantasy feels like a wish you could have made yourself.

The suburban setting also enabled Spielberg’s autobiographical attention to his own divorced parents’ suburban California upbringing. Elliott’s family is broken in ways the children don’t fully understand.

The mother manages alone after the father has left for Mexico with a girlfriend named Sally. The absent father drives Elliott’s connection to E.T. partly. Both Elliott and the alien need rescue from situations that their families can’t resolve. The personal content gives the film weight that pure science fiction wouldn’t have produced.

The absent father is what lifts this above every other alien movie for me. Elliott is a lonely kid in a broken house, E.T. is lonely and stranded too, and I think that shared ache is why the film hits as hard as it does.

The Phone Home Sequence

The communicator construction sequence shows the children gathering household materials to build a device that will signal E.T.’s ship. The combination includes a Speak and Spell, an umbrella, kitchen items, and electronics components from Elliott’s room. The sequence shows child invention treated as serious problem solving instead of as cute play. The technical challenge has weight that conventional family film treatment of similar material would have lacked.

When E.T. says phone home for the first time, the line acquires meaning that later decades have maintained. The line acts as expression of longing that audiences of any age can recognize. The combination of alien linguistic limitation, child translator, and broken family in suburban California produces particular emotional content that the line concentrates.

Few film lines have achieved comparable cultural penetration. Phone home has entered general American vocabulary as expression of homesickness across multiple contexts.

I think “phone home” works because it’s so small. Two words from a creature who can barely talk, and suddenly the whole film is about wanting to go back where you belong. Trusting two words to carry that much takes a kind of confidence I wish more screenwriters had.

Does E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial still hold up?

My 10 comes easy. The kids feel real, the suburb looks like a place people live, John Williams’s score does half the crying for you, and Spielberg tells the story with a sincerity he’s never bettered. My one small complaint is that the government agents are more menace than character for most of the film. It’s the rare blockbuster whose huge success did nothing to dull it, and I’d put it in front of anybody of any age.

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