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Not since the glory days of the Walt Disney Productions—40 years and more ago, when Fantasia and Pinocchio and Dumbo first worked their seductive magic on moviegoers of every age—has a film so acutely evoked the twin senses of everyday wonder and otherworldly awe. With astonishing technical finesse and an emotional directness that lifts the heart, E. T. spins its tale of a shy, lonely boy in desperate need of a friend—when suddenly one falls out of the sky. The movie is a perfectly poised mixture of sweet comedy and ten-speed melodrama, of death and resurrection, of a friendship so pure and powerful it seems like an idealized love. None of this can be the result of computerized calculation; instead it stems from a seamless blend of writing, direction, casting and celestial good luck. Even its creator seems pleased: "I put myself on the line with this film, and it wasn't easy. But I'm proud of it. It's been a long time since any movie gave me an 'up' cry."
With the exception of 1941, a self-destruct farce starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, every Spielberg feature has been on the mark in jolting the moviegoer with intelligent grins and shudders. A prototype of the new "computer generation" of children, Spielberg uses the cinema's infernally complex machinery to tunnel into the popular psyche. That is why the most personal film of his youth, Close Encounters, was among his most popular. Poltergeist and especially E.T. should prove even more accessible to all kinds of moviegoers—for here the characters are richer and more human, and the encounters are with the hearts of darkness and light, in a part of America that prides itself on occupying the serene center of the national dream.
Together, the two new films compose a marvelously detailed diptych of suburban life. It is a life that Spielberg, who grew up in a series of bedroom communities, knows from the sheltered inside: "I've never been robbed or in a fistfight. I never saw a dead body. Until I went to New York City, I'd never eaten real Italian food. Walt Disney was my parental conscience. And my stepparent was the TV set." Virtually every Spielberg film has made room for the camaraderie and antagonisms that percolate across the Formica kitchen table. But until now, none of the films had been told or seen from the child's point of view—where the prefab house seems unique and enveloping, where every utilitarian recess holds its own sly secret, where Mom can be the Queen Mother or a royal pain, and Dad is Santa Claus or the Big Bad Wolf.