E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 1982
I remember seeing E.T. when it first came out and I was in high school. It was such a complete entertainment: funny, amazing, emotional, just everthing. I don’t know when or if I ever sat down and watched the whole thing again, but recently I bought the Blu-ray. For the 20th anniversary, Steven Spielberg made some “improvements” to the movie that got a lot of people mad, like changing the government agents’ guns to walkie talkies. He said he learned after that never to mess with a movie later. So my version, made for the 30th anniversary, seems to have left the movie alone with no mention even of the other version.
Watching again, there were some things I didn’t remember like how much Elliott shares E.T.’s feelings. Watching the extras it was interesting to learn that Spielberg hired real doctors to be the medical team working on E.T. so they could get all of the dialogue right. And the cute girl that Elliott kisses while E.T. is watching a similar scene on TV was played by Erika Eleniak who went on to be a playboy playmate and Baywatch star.
The movie still totally works. The animatronics for E.T. are really hit and miss, sometimes looking very lifelike, sometimes looking very fake. And the way he moves is always clunky since he has almost no legs, just feet attached to his body. The rest of it looks great though and could easily be made today only set in the 80’s, though except for the mother and the cars, there isn’t a lot of 80’s fashion on display.Written: 21 Jan 2018
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital