It’s a thin line between charming, candy-flavored verisimilitude and craven commercialism, and if Spielberg ultimately stayed on the right side of it, “E.T.” nevertheless helped open a Pandora’s box of product placement. The goodies were licensed from Hershey, whose global sales increased exponentially as a result. The boy’s “Star Wars” collectibles are complemented by the Reese’s Pieces he uses to lure E.T. Young Elliott (Henry Thomas) sleeps surrounded by plastic action figures and ephemera from Lucas’s lucrative cinematic universe. parable so persuasive was its patina of brand-name realism, with a wealth of sharply etched material details that account for its tidal emotional potency. More than any of the film’s other achievements - its precise, poetic evocation of a peaceably tree-lined suburbia its seamless integration of a mechanical character into a live-action ensemble the soaring euphoria of John Williams’s score - what made Spielberg’s alien B.F.F. In lieu of Kubrick’s anxious allegory about humans outsmarted and destroyed by their own technology, George Lucas put escapism on the table - “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” - and staged a reassuringly Manichaean battle between good and evil, with very fine aliens on both sides. Almost a decade later, “Star Wars” used a similar array of special effects to cultivate more weightless sensations. The film’s grandeur was undeniable, and so was its gravitas: It was an epic punctuated with a question mark.
Following the pulp fictions of the ’50s, if there was one movie that represented a great leap forward for cinematic science fiction, it was Stanley Kubrick’s epically scaled, narratively opaque 1968 film “ 2001: A Space Odyssey,” which not only featured a massive, mysterious monolith but also came to resemble one in the eyes of critics and audiences alike. Whether the summer of ’82 represented the gentrification of cinematic sci-fi or its artistic apex, the genre’s synthesis of spectacle and sociology had been underway for some time. How could five such indelible movies arrive at the same time? Whether giving a dated prime-time space opera new panache or recasting 1940s noir in postmodernist monochrome, the filmmakers (and special-effects technicians) of the summer of ’82 created a sublime season of sci-fi that looks, 40 years later, like the primal scene for many Hollywood blockbusters being made - or remade and remodeled - today.
The range of tones and styles on display was remarkable, from family-friendly fantasy to gory horror. Not all of these movies were created equal artistically, but taken together, they made a compelling case for the increasing thematic flexibility of their genre.
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