Close Encounters of the Third Kind/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Awesome Music: The communication music has forever been associated with films about aliens. Also, the score is done by John Motherfucking Williams. Case closed.
    • For reference, the communication music is known as "Wild Signals."
    • Listen carefully for musical Shout Outs to Jaws (when the mothership is communicating with the Devils Tower base) and Pinocchio (when Roy is being led into the ship).
      • The presence of "When You Wish Upon A Star" in the score is more than just a shout-out -- it was a theme that Spielberg insisted upon. And when the "Special Edition" came out, it became the end credits music, played as they scroll by and the mothership slowly recedes into the night sky.
  • Designated Hero: Guess.
  • Funny Moments: When the mothership makes its full appearance over the contact base, one of the technicians rushes past Roy and straight into a port-o-let.
    • Also, this.
    • Rolling the whole damn giant globe over to the trailer to look at it.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: The humans who enter the mothership at the end are dressed in red jumpsuits and sunglasses, which in hindsight look like cheap versions of the aliens' outfits from the original V miniseries (in which the aliens did not turn out to be cuddly, friendly greys).
  • Moment of Awesome: That spaceship. All of them actually. Imagine a neon display that can fly.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Barry's abduction scene, the general scenes of electronics going haywire, and to many, Roy's obvious descent into alien-induced madness. It's just so very deadpan and the setting so banal, yet his madness is profound.
    • Johnny Mathis singing "Chances Are" is just the cherry on the icing.
    • According to the making-of documentary, Barry's actor wasn't afraid of the abduction scene at the time. Not only was he 'abducted' into his real-life mother's arms, but Spielberg had told him all about what was going to happen a few hours before.
  • Seinfeld Is Unfunny: Compared to The X-Files. Which came along sixteen years later.
  • Values Dissonance: New Age faith in alien intelligence as a benevolent Higher Power, and in the sterile void of space as Heaven, doesn't resonate much any more, to say nothing of the hatred that comes down these days on a parent who abandons his family to pursue some other goal.
    • Although Roy never left his family, it was his family that left him! On the telephone to his wife, he says he is trying to be a good parent and that he'll do anything his wife wants if she were only to return, implying he sincerely wants to try to put his obsession behind him. Given the way the conversation ends however, do you think his wife was ever considering letting him see the kids again? It's hard to argue that Roy has anything really left for him on Earth?
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