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In the Spielberg world, there is a reason for this. Children, creatures of innocence and intuition, evolve a fantasy life—their real life—that personalizes everything around them. Machines become toys, toys are animated into pets, pets turn into near-human friends, and all play crucial roles as the saints and dragons of a child's deepest dreams. In Poltergeist, Carol Anne talks to "the TV people," and they talk back; they even play with her, to malefic effect. But Spielberg, as he demonstrated in Close Encounters, is no kidnaper. What he takes from the audience—in thrills, anxiety, even children—he gives back, better than new.
In E. T. he goes a step further: he gives back a new fairy tale as good as old. The film opens on a night sky, Disney I blue and full of twinkling stars. In the clearing of a forest that Bambi and Thumper might have been pleased to call home, a spaceship sits — not a high-tech marvel of the NASA future but a bell-shaped spinster of a ship, with old-fashioned street lamps appending and the unmistakable aura of Captain Nemo's Nautilus from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A misty crescent moon gives glimpses of child-size figures moving about in capes and cowls on a field expedition for earth flora. One of these figures wanders off and encounters the threatening glare of headlights and the honking of car horns. Before the errant extraterrestrial can return to his comrades, the spaceship abruptly ascends and little E.T. is left, alone and friendless, in an alien climate, where he can never flourish and may not survive.
E.T, a gentle space elf who at first glance seems as homely as a turtle without its shell yet eventually proves as beautiful as an enchanted frog, must find a rescuer. And the rescuer must be a child, whose Galahad strength only E.T. and the moviegoer can immediately discern. The child is Elliott (Henry Thomas), a thin, quiet, wise-faced lad of ten who makes initial contact in a time-honored American fashion: by playing catch with a softball. With the help of his older brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and younger sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore), Elliott must battle the elements and some prying adults in a children's crusade to win E.T. his freedom.
To Elliott, E.T. is everything a boy could want: a toy, a pet, a jolly Space Invader of a video game — most of all, a friend whose feelings become his own. To Gertie, E.T. is a youngest sibling's most welcome addition: someone even smaller than she, an infant brother she can dress up as a bag lady and even teach to speak. E.T. is remarkably adaptable and wonderfully funny in his adventure on earth. Left alone in the house, he toddles around like a middle-aged ironworker on a weekend without the wife, his potbelly peeking out of a plaid bathrobe as he watches TV and gets drunk on Coors beer. Later still, he is a holy sage, a whiz-kid Yoda, constructing a transmitter out of spare parts to signal his spaceship. And he has an extra gift for children. If the moment is propitious, and they truly believe, E.T. can make them fly away from danger and into the harvest-moon sky.