E.T.

E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982)

I went in braced for sentimentality and came out disarmed by how much genuine grief is buried under the wonder.

A lonely boy named Elliott, living with a single mother and siblings in the aftermath of his parents' divorce, discovers an alien stranded on Earth and hides him in his home. Their bond deepens into something almost telepathic — when E.T. sickens, Elliott sickens with him — until government forces close in and Elliott must help him get home before it's too late. The plot is simple by design; the ache underneath it isn't.

Henry Thomas as Elliott gives one of the great child performances in American cinema — his tears in the finale aren't performed, they feel excavated. Drew Barrymore, as his little sister Gertie, brings an unforced, chaotic honesty that grounds the film's more fantastical moments. And E.T. himself, entirely puppetry and animatronics, achieves something remarkable — I forgot within twenty minutes that I was looking at a machine.

Spielberg and cinematographer Allen Daviau shoot much of this from a child's literal eye-level, adults often reduced to legs and shadows, which quietly reinforces that this is Elliott's world, not the adults'. John Williams's score is doing at least half the emotional labor of this film — the bicycle flight theme alone can undo me regardless of how many times I've heard it. The editing holds on faces a beat longer than expected, letting reaction linger rather than cutting away from feeling.

This arrived right after Spielberg's own difficult childhood-adjacent work and reportedly drew from his parents' divorce, which explains why the melancholy underneath the whimsy feels so lived-in rather than manufactured. It's the film where his instinct for wonder and his instinct for genuine sadness finally met in perfect balance.

It became, briefly, the highest-grossing film ever made, and critical acclaim matched the commercial embrace almost unanimously — it received multiple Oscar nominations and has aged into a permanent fixture of the American cultural imagination.

Underneath the wonder, I think this film is really about the specific loneliness of a child processing a family breaking apart, and how a friendship with something entirely alien can hold what human adults around him are too distracted to offer. 

My biggest takeaway, sometimes we need an outsider, someone entirely other, to reflect back to us the love we didn't know we were starving for.