Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Midnight Special

I chose these two movies because they both share the same idea of a group of people being drawn to a specific location by an unusual force.  One is a classic and the other is a little known film released just this year, but both excellently represent the scifi genre.  

Close Encounters is one of a number of excellent sci-fi films to come out in 1977, and represents along with Star Wars an evolution in special effects.  It also presents an interesting take on the genre.  It is clearly a drama and not action heavy like its contemporary Star Wars.  However, the feeling it gives goes beyond drama, it’s not quite a mystery and not quite a thriller, but it has elements of both.

Richard Dreyfuss plays a blue color electrician who has an encounter with what he believes is an Alien craft.  His obsession over the craft and what it could possibly mean for him takes over and eventually drives his family away.  He meets a young mother whose son was abducted by the Aliens and they end up travelling together to Devil’s tower in Wyoming.  They just feel drawn there as if it is where they are meant to be.

A secondary story follows a French professor who has been tasked with understanding the strange encounters and trying to find a way to communicate with the Aliens.  Combined the two stories tell us very little about the aliens or what their purpose might be.  The whole films seems to be an exploration of our place and the universe and a search for our identity and purpose.  

It’s a beautiful film and most definitely a classic.  I’d get into more detail, but it’s a such a well known film that if you haven’t seen it yet you should just go watch as soon as you can.  

Midnight Special is a modern film with a modern take on a similar idea.  Whereas Close Encounters is an optimistic view about humanity’s place in the universe, which is kind of a reflection of the time in which it was made.  The same can be said about Midnight Special in that our current time has a much more pessimistic idea of where humanity is and where it’s going.

While I believe that’s true, it doesn’t actually feel like a pessimistic film.  It starts with a news report about a kidnapping only to see that the people watching it are the kidnapped child and the two men who kidnapped him in a hotel room.  We quickly learn that one of the men is the boy’s birth father (Michael Shannon) and the other is his childhood friend (Joel Edgerton) and that they were taking him away from the cult.  

It becomes clear that there is something very unique about the boy who is constantly wearing goggles.  We also see that they block out all sunlight in their hotel rooms with cardboard.  We learn bit by bit that the boy has some kind of unique ability, the nature of which is unclear, however he was prone to delivering strange messages that the cult he was stolen away from saw as gospel.  This is why the cult leader had adopted him in order to keep him safe.

The Government was also after the boy as it seemed many of his revelations was actually just top secret military chatter.  As the movie goes along we learn more and more about the extent of the boy’s powers.  We meet his mother (Kirsten Dunst) and they are all headed to a set of coordinates that they were able to decipher from the strange messages that the young boy had given out.  

It all culminates in members of the cult, the government and the outlaw family all converging on this one location.  The cult members expecting some kind of religious experience, the government unsure of whether the boy’s powers were a danger to them or a weapon they could use.  The mother and father just wonder if maybe the special boy they love belongs to something beyond them and their understanding.

A big criticism I’ve heard for this film is that the ending isn’t satisfying.  That the payoff doesn’t live up to the rest of the film, but I think that’s the whole point of the film.  That maybe there isn’t always a satisfying payoff.  That there is something beyond our understanding.  Where Close Encounters puts humanity at the center of a universal community, Midnight Special paints humanity as just a tiny piece of a much broader universe that we can’t come close to comprehending.  Midnight Special remains one of my favorite films of the year.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind 8/10

Midnight Special 9/10

The Wages of Fear (1953) vs. Sorcerer (1977)

Along with individual reviews I will likely do a series of duel reviews of films that have similar themes or ideas, or are just in some way reminiscent or inspired by each other.  This is one of those posts.  Today I’ll be taking a look at two films both of which were adapted from the 1950 French novel by Georges Arnoud called the Le Salaire de Peur, which literally means, The Salary of Fear.  The first is the 1953 thriller, of the same title, made by the great French Director Henri-Georges Clouzot, the English title was The Wages of Fear.  The second is the confusingly  titled 1977 film, Sorcerer from the American director, William Friedkin, known mostly for The Exorcist.  

Both films have their merits and essentially tell the same story, but there are some unique differences.  The story revolves around a small South American town that exists economically thanks to an American oil company.  It also serves as a haven for people from all around the world who have no where else to go.  There is very little work and many of these men are stranded without official papers or enough money to leave town.  

An opportunity arises when an explosion causes an oil fire at a well 300 miles away.  The only way to put it out is with an explosion of nitroglycerin.  However the nitroglycerin must be transported all 300 miles of the trip by truck, and there is no time for special equipment to secure it properly.  The oil company doesn’t want to sacrifice their own employees to this suicide mission, so they take the job to these stranded foreigners and offer them a large sum of money to accept the suicide mission.

Four men are selected to drive two trucks filled with this incredibly unstable cargo over rough terrain.  Friendships are developed and tested as they meet each obstacle as it comes in hopes of finally finding a way out of this tiny town that has become their prison.

Despite having the same source material the differences in the films are stark.  In the original film, Clouzot, begins the story already in the little South American village and quickly shows us the state of life for these men without a country.  A man in a white suit steps off a plane into this little town and has to bribe the customs officer to let him in.  He meets a fellow frenchman near the local saloon and they instantly connect and become fast friends.  This newcomer, called Jo, is the only character who even has a backstory as far as we are concerned.  And that backstory is given to us in tiny revelations that we can piece together to know that he is a criminal who had to flee for his life and is now stuck in this town with no money.

We can only assume that the other men are in similar circumstances, however in Friedkin’s Sorcerer, the first 40 minutes of the movie is spent on nothing but backstory.  We get to see where each man comes from and what brings them to that town.  What the American fails at is making the characters relatable.  Yes, we have a glimpse at where they came from, but we get very little information about who they are in their everyday lives.  Whereas in the original French film, we are able to get to know the characters in their everyday lives in this tiny town.  We see the lives that they live and the desperation that is bred in this town where work is limited and difficult.  Clouzot makes their decision to join this suicide mission completely understandable.

Then the relationships of the characters are far more developed in the original, making their interactions during the stressful situations all that much more interesting.  The two Frenchmen who share a truck see their friendship fall apart, as Jo, the master criminal who convinced Mario, to do the job, gets the jitters, as his co pilot calls it.  He breaks down and his nerves get the better of him.  His friend is sympathetic at first, but gets increasingly agitated as the journey goes on.  The men in the other truck have lived in the same town as Mario for a long time and they all knew each other well, Jo becomes increasingly isolated and left out as he refuses to engage in anything that might help them complete their mission.

At this point you probably realize which telling of this story I prefer, the French film builds better characters, but also makes the tension of this situation palpable.  You feel what they feel.  You share the limited space in the cab with the men and feel the heat that that they feel.  Where the Friedkin film creates drama with noise and big set pieces, Clouzot creates tension through the quiet moments, giving nothing else to think about, but what might happen if they hit a pothole in just the wrong way.

Now this isn’t to say that Friedkin’s film is a bad one, in fact, it’s quite good, it’s just an incredibly different take on the story and one that fell a little flat for me.  Friedkin’s other very well known film besides The Exorcist is The French Connection, which I had a similar response to.  There is little fault I can find with either this film or The French Connection, but something about them just left me feeling nothing.  Now I will admit this is actually a stylistic approach that just doesn’t work for me and was actually the popular style of the 1970’s when those films were made.  American thrillers of the time told great stories, but they told them to us and didn’t allow us to experience the events of the film with the characters.  The immersive quality of Clouzot’s original is what takes it elevates it far beyond what Friedkin was able to accomplish.

The story itself is a brilliant one that will keep you on the edge of your seat, and each film does an interesting job telling that story.  I’d highly recommend one over the other, but if you’re not one that enjoys subtitles, I might recommend Sorcerer, as the subtitles are limited mostly to the first 30 minutes and the majority of the dialogue is in English.  But if you simply want to watch the better film, then go find The Wages of Fear, and I don’t think you will be disappointed.

P.S. I can’t help but think that the studio behind Sorcerer was intentionally deceitful.  This was Friedkin’s followup to the runaway hit The Exorcist.  I’m positive their hope was that the title would make people think it was a similarly creepy horror film, as the film itself has nothing in it that would make a title of Sorcerer make any sense at all.  Just goes to show you that studios really will do just about anything to capitalize on a previous success.

The Wages of Fear   9/10

Sorcerer  6/10