Since a few Observer readers may have spent the past six months submerged in a laboratory tank as the subjects of sensory deprivation experiments, it is perhaps necessary to begin a review of Steven Spielberg's E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial (Empire and general release, U) by outlining the plot and mentioning that, by doing nothing fundamentally new, the picture has hit a nerve not only in Reagan's America, but throughout the globe, breaking box-office records everywhere and shifting more connected merchandise than even Mickey Mouse did.
A creature from another planet, visiting California on some botanical mission, is left behind by his spaceship on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He communicates by music and lights, like the visitors in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, though his vehicle is smaller, less awesome than theirs. After being pursued by menacing adults through a Disneyesque wood, he's befriended by the 10-year-old Elliott (Henry Thomas), who enlists the help of elder brother Michael and little sister Gertie.
Together, they conceal him from their mother (who's in a badly shaken state after the recent departure of her husband with another woman) and from the lurking authorities, whom they rightly suspect of having the darkest designs on this creature with a princely brain inside his frog-like head. E.T., as they name their playmate, learns to speak and they help him to contact his own planet.
In E.T. the old sentimentality embraces the new technology to disarming effect, the syrup being drained off the former and the chilly edge removed from the latter. This is a close encounter between J.M. Barrie and H.G. Wells. Even if the film hadn't signalled one of its main sources by having the children's devoted mother read to the little Gertie the scene where Captain Hook attempts to poison Peter Pan, no child of this century will need to ask for whom the Tinker Bell tolls when the audience is virtually called upon to will the dying E.T. back to life.
The other influences include the world of animated cartoons for much of the visual style (until the final 20 minutes all the adults except for the mother are seen either from behind or cut off above the waist), and The Wizard of Oz. What would it be like, we're asked, if Frank Baum's story were reversed and a Munchkin came down to earth needing the assistance of a lonely, middle-American Dorothy to help him return home?
The world E.T. has come to is a violent, threatening place. Elliott torments his goldfish with a plastic head of Bruce the shark from Spielberg's Jaws on the end of a stick. His brother wears a T-shirt with a Space Invaders screen emblazoned on it. On the wall of Elliott's school is a chart of extinct animals, and his biology class are given chloroformed frogs to dissect by their teacher, against whom Elliott (in touch by ESP with E.T.) leads a fashionable revolt for animal rights. The natural creatures of this earth, as exemplified by a deer and rabbit in the woods, are untroubled by the alien's presence. E.T.'s message is peace, his mission to heal and to make things flourish.
When the baleful phalanxes of officialdom descent on Elliott's home in a manner that invokes Roman legionnaires, Nazis and the followers of Darth Vader, the only scientist to see the creature the way the children do is a mysterious watcher of the skies, clearly a blood brother to the character played by Truffaut in Close Encounters.
Until we see his face he has been identified by the keys on his belt and is clearly intended to suggest St Peter. 'He came to me, too,' he tells Elliott, 'I've been waiting since I was 10 years old and I don't want him to die.' To fill out this Christian allegory, the children's mother is called Mary, and the garden shed where Elliott first meets E.T. is lit like a manger.
What prevents the movie becoming religiose or mawkish is the detail, good humour and invention that Spielberg and his screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, bring to the telling of the tale and the affectionate creation of this corner of middle-America. The children, so delicately responsive to Spielberg's directions, exchange colourful insults like 'penis breath' and 'zero charisma', and the only occasion the sadly stoical Elliott openly weeps is when he's deliberately misleading the authorities, and his wailing brings laughter to disperse our tears. Spielberg clearly loves E.T. as much as the kids do, but he stops short of reverence. E.T. is indeed a marvellously funny creature and a credit to his galaxy.