Steven Spielberg has confessed that if he had a chance to make this movie today, Roy would never have abandoned his family to go to outer space. Source: “Spielberg on Spielberg”, 2007, TCM.
Probably the cheapest, most predictable effect in movies today is the family reunion. Whatever the adventure, where-ever the journey, whenever the time, ending the film with a family reunion gets the tears flowing and a sense of smug satisfaction all around. You don’t need to think of a story or dialogue or a shot. Just have the family reunite. Done. The “family” can even be a loosely knit group of friends, or workplace colleagues.
And one of Spielberg’s least uninteresting characters, ever, is Roy from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. At the end of the movie [spoiler alert!] Roy decides to go into the spaceship and travel to some distant planet and have a lot of very, very interesting adventures. The only problem is– and it’s not really a problem– Roy is married and has a family. Richard Dreyfuss played Roy and did his best to suck all the life out of the character and I think he generally succeeded. The drama here is just how intensely Roy wanted to restart his life. That’s interesting. But it’s not homogenized or generic or white bread enough for Spielberg.
So if Spielberg were making the movie today, he would resume his unending quest to remove all interesting characteristics from all his major characters and make sure there is a family reunion at the end or lots and lots and lots of weeping so that just in case his story or the filming or the acting didn’t move you– god knows, the horrible music by John Williams won’t– you will be clobbered with this exhibitionistic display to tell you how to feel.