"You could be happy here, I could take care of you. I wouldn't let anybody hurt you. We could grow up together, E.T," says Elliot, the lonely, imaginative main character of Steven Spielberg's pop culture juggernaut, “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” encapsulating the spirit of a movie that's essentially about finding your place in the world, about growing up.
Spielberg's emotional, magical tearjerker captured the imagination of millions of moviegoers in 1982, and is still widely considered one of the best movies of all time.
The film follows Elliot and his younger sister Gertie as they discover and befriend an alien stranded on Earth. In their attempts to help E.T. return home, Elliot and Gertie evade the men and women of the nation's military-industrial complex hoping to use the alien for their own sinister and greedy purposes.
A predecessor to films like “WALL-E” and “Super 8,” “E.T.” approached alien-centric movie-making from the point of view of its young characters, who regard E.T. with wide-eyed wonderment and friendship. In a world where grown ups are as alien to them as any creature from a foreign planet, Elliot and Gertie see E.T. as a lonely soul they can identify with, who just wants to find his way home.
“What’s perhaps most amazing about “E.T.,” Salon critic Charles Taylor wrote in 2002, “is its ability to put an audience under a spell of childlike wonderment without infantilizing it.”
“This comforting fantasy, made by a man who could still remember what it was like to feel like a hurt child, is really about leaving the reassurance of childhood behind.”
“E.T.” became the highest-grossing film of all time at its release in 1982, garnering nearly $793 million worldwide. Even adjusted for inflation, “E.T.” ranks as the No. 4 highest grossing film in history, behind only “Gone With The Wind,” “Star Wars” and the “Sound of Music.”
Nominated for nine Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay, “E.T.” also boasts one of the world’s most recognizable soundtracks. John Williams won the Oscar for the film’s soaring, magical score.
For his contribution to the cinematic zeitgeist, Rolling Stone called Spielberg "the most successful movie director in Hollywood, America, the Occident, the planet Earth, the solar system and the galaxy."
“Where were you in 1982? You were likely in a theater, munching on Reese's Pieces and choking up at the story of an alien 3 million light years from home,” says WTOP critic Jason Fraley in a review of the remastered edition due out in October.
But Spielberg didn’t set out to make a record-breaking blockbuster. He told Total Film in 2004 that he had no idea it would be so successful.
“I didn’t think it would be a hit, because it was about kids and no films about kids under 18 were doing any business then.”
Unlike many blockbusters of the loud, bombastic persuasion, Spielberg wrote E.T. as a quiet, personal ode to an imaginary friend he created when his parents’ divorce left the young Spielberg lonely and searching.
"It was like when you were a kid and had grown out of dolls or teddy bears," Spielberg has said.
"You just wanted a little voice in your mind to talk to."
The film's affecting goodbye scene, when E.T. and Elliot stay goodbye, has had adults and children alike sobbing into their tissues since 1982.
