F -

Slow ass beginning and didn't start moving until Elliot escaped with E.T. from that place, and even then it was boring. Boring movie. Uninteresting characters. Horrible story. Bad direction. Just plain bad.

I've never actually seen it but people always say how great it is. I've never really even planned on seeing it either.

Never seen it. Maybe I should watch it sometime.

I saw it at the theater when i was 3 and cried at the end.....sniff.....it still chokes me up

A+

I loved ET as a child, it's a great family film and one of the classics from the 80's. I watched it recently though and it has lost some of its magic, but possibly because i'm not a kid anymore!

Everyone should see it though, its one of the best in its genre. I gave it a B+.

One of my favorite movies of all time. This has incredible character development, and has a lot of emotion in it.

My grade: 91.0 , A-
(#21 on my All-Time list)

I have no idea why this film is not something that I like more, since it's directed by my favorite director. Even putting that aside, I actually knew the guy who played E.T. Well, I met him a few times, but my father knew him. Strangely enough, the little 3 foot guy met my dad in the 60's, when he filled in on drums one night for my dad's rock band. He was the first little person I had ever met, and I was not exactly used to towering over an adult. I was just a kid. I asked my dad how on Earth somebody so small could play drums, and he told me that he had special extensions made that allowed him to reach the pedals for the bass drum and hi hat, and the tom toms and symbols were all angled closely so his short arms had no problems. He also drove his own car, which was something to see. Unfortunately, he died not long after E.T. was released.

For some reason, I never loved E.T.. I did love the other movie he was in with Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher called Under the Rainbow, but E.T. just never hooked me.

B-/C+

I have often thought about watching it again, because it was so beloved. If there was ever a chance of being wrong about a movie, it was this one. There have been a few times where the second viewing made it all come together for me, as sometimes, your mood can affect the way you view something. Caddyshack became one of my most beloved comedies (a 3 way tie for #1 on my list), but I wasn't exactly enamoured with it the first time I saw it for some reason. Maybe watching E.T. again would be a similiar experience.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a very special movie for me. My parents chose never to take me to the movies before the age of 3 (considering all the babies I see now, probably a good idea), and this was the first film I ever saw in a theater.

My love for it has not changed since.

A+

B

Steven Spielberg is by far my favorite director of all time. Howrever, I can't help, but say that this movie is anything, but a masterpiece. It is decent family entertainment, but really not much more. Certainly, it is cute, the ending is touching and overall it never bores you, but I fail to see anything particulary special in this movie.

I just looked up over-rated in my dictionary and found a picture of E.T.

This one was a low point even among the many crummy films of Steven Spielberg (e.g.: Saving Private Ryan, Jurassic Park 1, Hook, and Indiana Jones 3). I never understood how it got such a big BO, though I suspect some form of mass hypnosis...

2 out of 5.

I want to cry. Mass hypnosis?

I suspect it's too hard to come to terms with the fact people liked it.

I'm surprised to hear that you've never experienced that type of disconnect between your own personal opinion about a movie and the general public's opinion.

My use of the expression "mass hypnosis" was simply an exaggeration for effect to communicate my own such disconnect... no need to cry.

Well, yes, I understand your original point.

...and I'm just being a geek today.

Don't mind me, heh.

Same here, I didnt enjoy it that much. I think my main reason was because I saw movies like Starman, Cocoon and Short Circuit which borrowed quite a bit from ET. I know ET came out first but I didnt quite symphasize with him even though he looked like this big old ugly tortoise

Agreed.

One of the best films ever made and experienced, 14 May 2002

Author: Dan Grant (dan.grant@bell.ca) from Toronto, Ontario


Everyone gets lost in nostalgia from time to time. Many of us vividly recall the days when the most important thing you had to do that afternoon was find a place to stay cool or to make sure that all of your friends were willing to go on whatever adventure you wanted to embark on. For me, those days were the years between 1980 and 1987. At this time I was between the ages of 8 and 15. This was a time when some of the greatest movies were ever made for a teenaged boy. The genesis of film was started in my life with films like First Blood, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, Ghostbusters, The Goonies, Back To The Future and of course E.T.

Being that movies were such an intricate part of my young life and these experiences shaped me into the man that I am today, it is easy to recall with reverence the entire experience that went with those films. E.T. is a rare film however, because it is an experience that just gets better with age.

There was a theater in Windsor Ontario, where I spent my youth called the Vanity, located on Oullette Street, right near Wyandotte. This one theater was the place to be when the blockbsuters arrived. It was a one celled theater that managed to flourish in a time which pre-dated multi plexes with arcades and Pizza Hut's.

When the sequel to Star Wars arrived, the Vanity proudly played it. Same with Raiders and it's sequels and of course E.T. E.T. was a film that me and my best friend Gary had to see because it was Spielberg. Even though we were ten years old, we knew that Spielberg had given us great films like Jaws, Close Encounters and Raiders of the Lost Ark. I am not sure if it is normal at the age of ten but we rushed out to see E.T. because we knew who directed it. What a phenom this tiny film turned out to be and what a life changing experience the whole film was.

When you are ten and you see a movie with your best friend who watches the A-Team and Conan the Barbarian with you, you expect a certain reaction from him. After all, this same friend enjoys playing football at lunch and enjoys inflicting pain in a barbaric pasttime called the "The Tripping Game", therefore you don't expect a film to affect you and your macho friend the way E.T. did. When you are ten, you go to the movies to see things like lightsabre duels and heroes with bullwhips being lowered into the Well of the Souls and maybe the occasional breast shot. What you don't expect is a film to manipulate your emotional realm thh way E.T. did and still does. Most of my friends who saw E.T. bawled their eyes out at the age of ten. I, for some unexplainable reason did not. I loved the film but it wouldn't be for another six years that I cried in my first film. That was She's Having A Baby when Kate Bush sang Woman's Work and made me sob uncontrollably as I watched Kevin Bacon lose his unborn child. Some things can't be explained.

E.T. became one of my favourite films and I saw it again on its re-release in 1985, bought the poster, purchased the movie on VHS and told everyone who would listen that E.T. got robbed at the 82 Oscars when it lost every major category to (snicker snicker) Gandhi. There have been some Oscar travesties but this ( along with Annie Hall defeating Star Wars and Cuckoo's Nest beating Jaws ) had to be up there as one of the most ridiculous snubs ever. I was peeved. What a joke. But all of the cranky and derelict academy members seethed with contempt and jealousy because they couldn't accept the fact that a man this young could really be this much of a genius. In fact he made the rest of the folks in Hollywood look young compared to himself.

As the years passed I became a film lover, a movie buff and I tried to see any and every film out there. And I did. It's not that E.T. became an after-thought, it's just that it became one of those films that just sat it my collection and wasn't utilized often enough. When I made my revised top 25 list, E.T. would always hover around number 20. That is not an indictment of the quality of E.T., it's just that my tastes became more garnered to horror films and the sheer brilliance of E.T. was stored in the catacombs of my mind. That all changed on March 24th, 2002. This is ironic because my wife and I had the whole day planned. We were going to see E.T. at the theater and then come home and watch the 24 hour Oscar-a-thon. And in a year when an inferior film like A Beautiful Mind takes top honours from the much more ambitious and deserving Lord of the Rings, it reminded me of 20 years ago. I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Seeing E.T. after a 17 year hiatus was nothing short of uplifting. My excitement was gushing and when John Williams' ever recognizable score reverberated over the sound system, I was hooked and it felt like I was ten all over again. I also noticed that the audience was an eclectic mix of young kids, 30 somethings like myself and the elderly. All of us were there because we either wanted to experience it for the first time or because we wanted to feel what it was like that first time we saw it 20 years ago.

I think I liked E.T. when I was ten but this time around I developed a deep level of respect for it. E.T. is simply one of the finest films ever made and if you have not seen the film in the theater then you have no idea what you are missing. Everything about this film is perfect, and there really aren't many films around I can say that about. Even some of my personal favourites have moments of weakness but not E.T. There has never really been another movie that has offered the experience that E.T. does. And when I said that I didn't shed a tear while watching E.T., that has all changed. I think there were about five moments in E.T. that had me holding back the tears. You can analyze the film, psychologically deconstruct it and tell me that the reason the film works so well is because of the feeling of loneliness and comradery and I will agree with you. But I don't really care about that. What it comes down to is that E.T. is a film that will touch you in a way that no other film before could do and no other film after it can. 1982 was a different time for film and it was a different time as a civilization. And E.T. encompassed all of that. If I had to make my revised top 25 list, E.T. would be number 2, right behind Jaws and ahead of JFK, Halloween, American Beauty and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

If you have not seen E.T. at the theaters since 1985, please I urge you, go see it again. It is a film experience that is indefeasible. It is also a film that should be looked upon as a paradigm for which all movies should try to emulate. There is a reason that films like E.T. and Star Wars and Raiders make the money they do. And there is also a reason they stay firmly planted in our memories. That is because they mean something and they stand for something. Those are the qualities in film that transcend time and they transcend the generations.

10 out of 10----What more can be said?

baumer72, well written post. =D> and I agree.

A

It really is an amazing film. I watched it as a kid all the time on video, I saw it in theater's for it's 20th anniversery and now own it on DVD. I like to watch it every now and then. ET is a must for anybody.

10/10 (A+)

thank you. \:D/

One of the most overrated movies ever. C-

I think to truly appreciate E.T., you have to have a little understanding of the tiem that it was released and the power it had over all of us then. ET brings a tear to my eye every time I see it. The feelings of loneliness and iscolation are so omnipotent in the film and the message conveyed here is one of the strongest in my days of watching film.

Yeah, as I said in my earlier post, this film is dear to me because it's the first one I saw in a movie theater.

It's pretty close to mine as well. In 82 I was 10 years old, and that was about when I started going to the movies. What a magical experience.

Only a true movie fan can appreciate E.T. The humor, the story, the sad moments. Until I watched it again last night I never realized how truly beautiful the movie was. It is now definitley one of my all-time favorites from Spielberg. E.T. himself is one of the best characters in cinematic history. Elliot is a bit of an over-actor sometimes, but he does great in the emotional scenes.

A+