so it can be rescued. Nine-year-old Henry Thomas
played the boy, Elliott, in a performance critic Roger
Ebert called the best little-boy screen performance
he had ever seen. Robert MacNaughton and Drew
Barrymore played Elliott’s siblings, and Dee Wallace
played his mother. It was an intensely personal story
for director Steven Spielberg, whose parents’ di-
vorce led to a lonely childhood much like the one he
gave to Elliott. By combining a science-fiction prem-
ise with realistic familial situations and interactions,
Spielberg transformed the former genre, using it to
tell a type of story that before had had no place in
mainstream science fiction.
The movie was the highest-grossing film to that
time and the most successful film of the decade. It
took in more than $435 million domestically and al-
most $793 million worldwide. It was nominated for
nine Academy Awards and won four, for Best Sound
Effects Editing, Best Sound, Best Visual Effects, and
Best Original Score. The majestic and sensitive score
by John Williams also won Golden Globe, Grammy,
and BAFTA Film awards.
Spielberg had been developing the idea of the
story for years, and when he pitched it to screen-
writer Melissa Mathison, she produced a first draft in
eight weeks.E.T.juxtaposed its family drama not
only with science fiction but also with religious and
mythic imagery (the film’s poster featured a human
finger reaching out to touch a finger of the alien, a
conscious allusion to Michelangelo’s paintingCre-
ation of Adam). The movie also incorporated self-
conscious references to previous science-fiction tales.
E.T. gets his idea for communicating with his de-
parted ship from a Buck Rogers newspaper comic
strip. He watches on television a flying saucer se-
quence from the 1955 movieThis Island, Earth. The
little alien’s “hand” resembles that of the Martian in-
vaders from the 1953 film adaptation of H. G. Wells’s
War of the Worlds(1898) produced by George Pal.
Spielberg even re-created the sequence from that
film in which a Martian hand reached out and
touched a character’s shoulder. In the 1953 film, it
was a moment of horror, but when E.T. touches
Elliott’s shoulder, it is an affectionate and reassuring
gesture.
Impact Before E.T., science-fiction films set on
Earth were most commonly akin to horror films.
The image of aliens in such films was malignant.
They came to drain humans’ blood (The Thing,
1951), wipe them out (1953’sInvaders from Marsand
War of the Worlds), steal Earth’s scientists (This Island,
Earth, 1955), replace humanity (Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, 1956), or worse. Even the relatively benign
aliens inThe Day the Earth Stood Still(1953) andIt
Came from Outer Space(1953) threatened, respec-
tively, to “reduce this Earth of yours to a burned-out
cinder” if humanity did not abandon its warlike ways
or to wipe out a hostile party of men who failed to un-
derstand that the aliens merely wanted to repair
their spacecraft and leave. Spielberg’sClose Encoun-
ters of the Third Kind(1977) came closest to present-
ing harmless aliens, but even those had kidnapped
humans over the years for undisclosed reasons.
WithE.T., Spielberg gave audiences cinema’s first
cuddly alien. Equally important, the antagonists inThe Eighties in America E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial 343
The original poster forE.T.highlighted the film’s religious themes
by referencing Michelangelo’s famous painting,The Creation
of Adam,from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.(Hulton Ar-
chive/Getty Images)