BY DANIEL BAIG | I'm assuming you've seen E.T.

If you haven't, you may be left a little lost by this "review." I'm certainly not about to recap the movie's plot. Instead, this will be more like a series of observations that came to me upon seeing this "NEW and IMPROVED!" E.T.

First: This was at least the fourth time I'd seen this movie. And I still cried. Profusely.

Second: While for the first time I watched it as a critic, and thus with a deliberately critical eye, and thus for the first time found a number of things to criticize, that still didn't manage to change my belief that this is unquestionably a great movie, and certainly the best thing  despite the terrific Jaws, the profoundly moving Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, the first and the third Indiana Jones films (probably the greatest adventure movies ever made), and the flawed brilliance of A.I.  Stephen Spielberg has ever done.

And there's one big reason for that (along with probably lots of little ones): Melissa Mathison's screenplay.

Sadly, the way modern movie culture has evolved, the director, and pretty much the director exclusively, is identified with a movie. Everyone knows directors' names; try coming up with names of non-directing screenwriters.

It's stupid, though. Try to direct a movie without a story, characters, or dialogue. It's a little tough.

It seems obvious to me that the screenwriter is equally, if not more, important than the director when it comes to a movie's success: no matter how good a director is, s/he can't make a bad script into a good movie. But even a bad director can manage to make a decent movie with a good script.

And with E.T., clearly Spielberg had a perfect marriage of sensibilities with Mathison. (Watch her previous movie, The Black Stallion, for some real parallels to E.T.)

Spielberg made the movie beautiful.

But it was Mathison who totally subverted all those alien invader movies which had come before. Instead of aliens taking over humans' bodies, she had the brilliant idea to have E.T. and Elliott become psychically linked.

All that great dialogue is hers. E.T. phone home. I'm keeping him. Penis breath. Ou-ouch. Be good. I'll be right here.

The totally real way the kids react to E.T., and in effect turn him into a pet, is so because she wrote it that way.

What makes you cry is a combination of her story and words, Spielberg's empathetic direction, and Henry Thomas' incredible performance.

Which brings me to my next set of observations:

It's been said many times before, but the kids' acting is just terrific in E.T. Seeing it again I was awed by Thomas, moved by Robert McNaughton as his brother, and, of course, totally charmed by Drew Barrymore all over again. And she's not only cute, of course. She's very, very good. (Although there is the tiniest hint that she knows how cute she is, and is playing it up.)

(A good way to see how good Thomas was is to compare his real crying scenes with the scene where Elliott fakes crying to fool the scientists.)

But there's one more great performance, which is often overlooked, and that's Dee Wallace Stone as the mom. In many ways, she's the anchor that holds the whole thing together. If she wasn't as believable as she is, it would be infinitely harder to accept and believe the kids and the way they are. Plus, seeing the obvious great love and concern she has for Elliott means that, though we feel terribly sorry for him when he has to say goodbye to E.T., we're not depressed, because we know he'll still remain in a place where he's surrounded by love.

And, she gives a warm face to the world of adults, otherwise only seen as a cold, uncaring science teacher, creepy astronaut guys, and the weird, ambiguous Keys.

Other thoughts and observations:

John Williams' music has quite a bit to do with how powerfully affected we are by E.T. When Elliott and E.T. go flying up into the sky, and then again when they pass the moon, that grand, swelling swoop up of that theme is part of what gets you. Can you even try to think of the image without hearing that music?

***

Light is so important in this movie. In the beginning sequences, especially, Elliott is constantly haloed by light, as he looks out of the house, etc.

Credit director of photography Allen Daviau.

***

One of the things that makes E.T. so different, especially looking back at it now after two decades of bright, good-looking, oh-so-witty and smarter-than-their-parents, and oh-so-very-very cool kid protagonists of movies and TV shows, is the fact that these kids in this movie aren't cool, by any stretch of the imagination.

The beginning of the movie finds them playing D&D, for god's sake; how much geekier can you get?

Older brother Michael isn't portrayed at 14 as being a junior stud, or even thinking yet about dating girls.

And none of these kids dress cool, either. I mean, just look at how ridiculous-looking Michael's friends who come to the rescue are. That hat!

***

E.T., like so many visitors before and since looking down on it from a mountainside, has his breath taken away by the vast plain of light that is Los Angeles.

***

I had totally forgotten how scary Spielberg makes the movie seem at the very beginning, during the credits; the music is horror movie music.

I had also totally forgotten (unless it was changed for this new edition, and that's why it didn't seem familiar) that the opening title credit E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is in PINKISH-PURPLE!

***

One thing that's sad to reflect on now, 20 years later, is how our society has changed in a certain respect: in E.T., the kids (all the kids in the neighborhood) are allowed to go trick-or-treating on their own, unaccompanied, after dark. There's no fear for their safety in doing so. It's not really a sight you'll see nowadays.

***

If you really think about it, there's a huge, gaping flaw at the heart of E.T.'s storyline. And that's: the movie is about E.T. phoning home, to tell his friends to come back and retrieve him. In other words, somehow they weren't aware he was still on Earth.

What, they didn't notice him missing onboard once they took off? It wasn't that big a ship. You'd think an absent crew member would be the kind of thing they'd manage to figure out before they got very far:

"Okay, roll call! XoaGq[o?"

"Here!"

"HuahaAhp!'h?"

"Here!"

"Mary?"

"Here!"

"E.T.? E.T.? Oh my god, we forgot E.T.!"

In other words, this was the intergalactic version of Home Alone.

"New And Improved":

For the most part, the stuff done to the movie for this rerelease is invisible, which it's supposed to be. Mostly it was little touch-ups, done digitally. So E.T. walks better in some scenes, especially when he's in the distance. The spaceship looks great, a little shinier perhaps than before.

And all that is fine.

As far as extra stuff  well, two scenes were added back in. One is very, very short, and it's just Elliott's mom out looking for him on Halloween. It's one more demonstration that she's really a good, concerned mother, and it also provides Drew with one more opportunity to be winningly cute.

The longer scene is of Elliott and E.T. hanging out in his bathroom, shortly after E.T.'s moved in. Elliott weighs his new friend, and there's a very funny gag about their heights. And E.T. takes a bath. But, when we look down from overhead at E.T. lying under the water on his back, for the first time ever (at least to me), he looked like an inanimate prop. It was off-putting.

Then E.T. plays around with a tube of toothpaste. And here there's some very obvious new CGI work, for E.T.'s fingers, and the toothpaste squirting out of the tube. The fact that it's so obvious is a good indication at how poor it is. I was honestly surprised Spielberg was satisfied enough with how it looks to release it like this.

A thought that the bathroom brought to mind: E.T. appears to function physically much as we do: he gets hungry, he eats, he burps, he gets sleepy, he even gets drunk. So, considering how much he eats, you'd think he'd also have occasionally to . . . . Well maybe his species is more efficient than ours, and their bodies can utilize everything from food, and don't produce waste . . .

The two big actual changes to the movie you've probably already heard about. One is that in the climactic chase sequence, when the feds are chasing Elliott and Michael and E.T., they had guns in their hands. Those guns have now, thanks to the miracle of CGI, become walkie-talkies.

Well, it wouldn't be such a big deal, except for two big problems:

One, it looks weird. Every single government agent is tightly gripping a walkie-talkie, and holding it out in front of him, as they race up to the stolen van and pull open its doors, etc. It looks silly, and unnatural. Why would they all be clinging to walkie-talkies like that? What do they need them for, anyway? They're all within a foot of each other.

Secondly, and far more importantly:

Dee Wallace Stone is shown in this scene as being absolutely terrified. She's screaming, pleading, begging the agents not to hurt her sons. Her fear and distress now make zero sense. She had no reason to fear them before, nor would she now, unless they were aiming guns at her kids.

So the change doesn't work, at all.

The second change also, frankly, doesn't work at all.

In the original, Dee Wallace Stone is emphatic that Michael not go out dressed for Halloween as "a terrorist." Her strong objection, of course, is natural, and in 1982 Michael's choice of a terrorist costume would not be all that uncommon.

The movie is still set in 1982. Spielberg doesn't seem to give his audience today any credit whatsoever for intelligence.

It's not like by any stretch of imagination the movie is condoning terrorism! Mom is really upset with Michael's choice.

But, the word has been changed to "hippie." Idiotic choice.

Why? Two reasons:

Why does Mom now object so vociferously to Michael going as a hippie? There's nothing terribly objectionable about it. Nothing about her character would indicate she'd have any problems with the concept. She herself wears a hot leopard catsuit! Her problem was with the violent nature of a terrorist. A hippie would be absolutely fine by her.

And, second, and more obvious:

Michael isn't dressed anything LIKE a hippie! Since when did hippies have short hair, camouflage, and wear bowler hats with knives stuck through them?? It's an absurd description of his costume!

Ironically, the word in Mathison's original script was actually "commando." Well, why didn't they use that one this time around. Stone's character's objections make a lot more sense vis a vis "commando" than they do "hippie."

A few piddling complaints about minor things which in no way detract from the overall power of the film:

There's way, way, WAY too much key-jangling from Peter Coyote's character (known in the credits as, uh, Keys). It seems as if Spielberg intends for the keys to be an ominous thing, a little Hitchcockian note, until near the end when we discover Keys' benign nature. There are numerous closeups of THE KEYS on Coyote's waist, etc., and with this new digital sound mix frequently their jangling is practically thundering in our ears.

The thing is, though, keys aren't exactly scary. Oh my god . . . he's the JANITOR!!!! AAAAAAHHHHH . . . .

(Please don't bother with the letters: "When you make your own $750 million grossing movie, you can leave out all the key-jangling you want." Yes, I know.)

The doctors in the "E.T. and Elliott in the 'E.R.' scene" are saddled with absolutely inane dialogue. It would have been better if somehow their voices were muffled or distorted, along the lines of the adults in Charlie Brown specials (though not as comical, of course). First, they have about a minute straight of absolute pseudo-scientific-medical gobbledygook. And then they can't make up their minds whether or not E.T. is like us or not: one minute, they're discussing his pulse, and his vital signs, and his E.K.G., and his blood pressure . . . in other words, they don't seem to have found him all that different from us in terms of basic functions. But then, moments later, one of them bursts into the room in a fever pitch of excitement, shouting, "He's got DNA! He's got DNA! (repeat)." Uh . . . why is that surprising?

Maybe I've just become too cynical, but this time around I found the little rainbow smear E.T.'s ship makes when it blasts away a little much. For one thing, SFX-wise, compared with everything else (in this new, super-duper version), it looks kinda cheap and, well, a tad lame.

A picayune question or two:

Where in Los Angeles do homes border cornfields? And, for that matter,

Where in Los Angeles do homes back up to REDWOOD FORESTS?? (Answer: nowhere.)

(Real answer: Who cares?)

Last comment/question: WHY IS EVERYONE SO SURE E.T. IS A BOY? Maybe "he's" a girl! (For that matter, quite possibly where he comes from, there is no male and female.) Elliott says he's a boy, and everyone accepts that. But it would be natural for Elliott to want "him" to be a boy. That doesn't mean "he" is.

The actual reason I thought of this is because in the production notes Spielberg refers to E.T. as "he," indicating he's sure, too. But why?

If you think about it, the only time we see E.T. in clothes, "he's" wearing a dress . . .

Grades:

for the sfx enhancements: B+
for the two changes (walkie-talkies, hippie): D
for the movie, either version: A/A+