Space 1979 Franchise Fatigue 3: The one that was a franchise movie without a franchise

 

Title: E.T. the Extraterrestrial

What Year?: 1982

Classification: Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: What The Hell??? (3/5)

 

With this review, I’m at the finale of the franchise lineup, and I’m honestly going with a movie that I not only had in mind at the start but did more than any other to give me the idea to cover “franchise” movies. At face value, it is in fact not a franchise movie but on the contrary famed or infamous for not getting a franchise. To me, however, it has long stood out as an exception to prove any “rule” for what constitutes a franchise at all, and all the more significant to the history of media franchises as a phenomenon. On that note, I present E.T. The Extraterrestrial, a movie that got toys, books and a video game but not a sequel.

Our story begins with a group of diminutive aliens emerging from a large, brightly lit spaceship to survey the plant life of Earth in the middle of the night, which goes about as badly as could be expected. When investigators arrive, who for all we or they know could be anything from a military unit to UFO cranks nobody would believe, the aliens run back to their fully functional starship and leave one of their own behind. We then meet an intermittently likeable kid named Elliott and his family, including a too-cute little sister. Of course, the castaway shows up in his backyard, and the pair strike up an unlikely friendship. Soon, they develop a telepathic bond that helps the alien learn about Earth while giving the kid a new perspective on the value of life. But when the alien begins to sicken, the kid also falls ill, and both are taken in by a group of government agents in biohazard suits. Will the alien’s comrades return to save them, or will he and his new friend die together? Judging from the species’ track record, all bets are off!

E.T The Extraterrestrial was produced and directed by Steven Spielberg for Universal. Spielberg reportedly developed the project in part in response to pressure to produce a sequel/ follow-up to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The movie starred Henry Thomas as Elliott, Dee Wallace as his mother and Drew Barrymore as his sister Gertie, with Peter Coyote as the agent Keys. The effects for ET were provided by Carlo Rambaldi, also responsible for the original Alien suit and Dagoth in Conan the Destroyer. The movie was an immediate success, earning up to $729 million worldwide against a $10M budget. It spawned ample merchandising and tie-in media, including an LJN toyline, an Atari game and a novel by William Kotzwinkle, the author of Dr. Rat. The game became a notorious failure that contributed to a crash of the company and the industry. Spielberg took part in the development of a sequel that would have involved a second, hostile alien race, but eventually abandoned the project. An authorized tie-in/ sequel novel Book of the Green Planet was written by Kotzwinkle and published in 1985.

At this point, I skipped ahead of my usual format to cover the franchise question. What’s become increasingly obscured is that even in the early ‘80s, sequels were still relatively few and more than a little random. A movie as commercially and critically iffy as Star Trek The Motion Picture had gotten a (much) better sequels, while Logan’s Run, Alien and, Close Encounters hadn’t or never did. What balances things in my mind is the absolutely massive merchandising footprint. By this standard, E.T. had more credentials and endurance than Indiana Jones or even Terminator before the sequel. When I was a kid, ET stuff was everywhere, and my sightings in the wild continued well into my preteens and adolescence, even without counting references and parodies (not to mention Mac and Me). I could go into a lot more detail, and probably will, but for the purposes of this review, it will more than suffice to say that if a property with this much of a pop culture afterlife doesn’t count as a “franchise”, it is by technicality only.

Moving on to the movie itself, I already did a lot of my venting already with Mac And Me. I like stories with pacifist aliens (see especially the works of Clifford Simak), but I can’t consider ET to be a good use of the theme. To make this scenario interesting, the aliens should start with a clear upper hand; Superman, of all things, is the definitive example. We know he could flat-out murder most of the villains he encounters and conquer a good part of the Earth, but he’s bound by his character and code of ethics more than any limit on his powers (the main reason Superman IV was at least conceptually interesting). One can read such concerns on ET himself, whose demonstrated powers could certainly devastate any force that attacked him. However, it’s much harder to extend such considerations to his species and civilization, who set up the whole mess by an impressive combination of carelessness and cowardice. With the actual Cold War conditions factored in, they are not just naïve but dangerously ignorant. This lot might just as soon collect butterflies on the 38^th parallel, and still not understand what the fuss was about.

With that out of the way, there’s still a lot more that I find myself trying to put a finger on. The tricky part here is that I’ve really only seen this film a few times in my life, so I still don’t have that good a frame of reference. My strongest impression is simply that it “feels” second tier. A good part of that could be put down to the budget, which is startlingly low for a Spielberg movie (actually lower than Mac And Me!). But there’s also elements that seem undeveloped or rushed, including the unaccountably awkward ET design and even the John Williams score. What gets entirely strange is the pervasively self-referential tone of the movie. There’s the infamous product placements, including a cringey appearance of Coors everyone seems to forget about. There’s the repeated references to Star Wars, which at times feel more blatant than the knockoffs I’ve covered (see Laserblast). Then there’s the repeated use of clips and visual references to other movies, notably a clip from This Island Earth. The overall effect is a movie that feels like a rehash of the past rather than one that broke new ground.

Something else I can’t hold back is the dynamics of the kids and the supposed “villains”, the government agents. To begin with, the story deliberately fractures the “happy family” cliches of the 1950s, particularly by making the father absent but explicitly alive, which is fine and forward-thinking. The kids, including Elliott, are further allowed to be bratty, whiney, and even profane, which again works up to a point. The problem is that they quickly become possessive rather than protective towards ET, and the story never corrects their attitude. This especially shows in their reactions to the government agents, who almost always show nothing but empathy and concern for ET, but still get treated as the bad guys simply because they don’t act on information the kids never share with them. The part that truly lost me is ET’s death scene, which I very strongly considered for the “one scene”. It’s as moving as it’s meant to be, except what stands out to me is that the clearly competent adults do everything they can to keep the alien alive, while the kids who insisted on taking care of him blame them for failing.

I’ve now gone longer than usual, and used even more time, and I still don’t have a “one scene”. It was a hard choice, but I’m going with the opening. (Honorable mention goes to the frog dissection scene, which I just can’t deal with.)  We start with a dark screen as the credits roll, accompanied by low-key music that’s not at all in character for a Williams score. The first cords of the theme start as we go to a night sky and a UFO that’s better-lit than a gas station parking lot. We get our first glimpses of ET’s species as they wander around gathering plants. Then the camera cuts inside the ship, revealing a garden of genuinely unearthly plants and/or fungi. There’s translucent, luminous mushrooms that are particularly fascinating. It seems as if the garden is either an object of quasi-religious veneration, or else a functional part of the ship’s technology. We then cut outside, and we see the famous heart lights flare red for all the shadowy aliens. What’s striking is that it happens to all of them simultaneously, and they all freeze in their tracks. It’s clear that they’ve detected incoming natives, well before we see the investigators, and they promptly prepare to leave. It’s an intriguing show  of their abilities and technology, so of course, it will have little or no role in the rest of the movie.

In conclusion, the one thing I have left to say is that, if anything, the rating I have given this movie is being generous. I went in expecting to give it no more or less than a 3, but there were more than enough jarring, baffling or outright cringey moments in my viewing (a paid rental, dammit) to push me close to lowering that number. The main thing that stayed my hand is that I still can’t justify giving it as low a rating as Trek 1, never mind Mac And Me. I freely admit, it probably would have gone over my head as an ‘80s kid as much as it does now, but there were still so many things the same people could and did do better, before and since. For me, the real redeeming feature of this movie is that it laid the way for better ones. And with that, I am done.