A lovable alien lands back on big screen

"E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL" lands on Earth again next week, 20 years after his first arrival.

The movie has a smidgen of new footage and a freshly tweaked soundtrack, but it's mostly the same fantasy audiences took into their hearts a generation ago.

Will today's moviegoers welcome it back? Or have cultural tastes and Hollywood trends undergone too many changes for the lovable alien to flourish in the 21st century? We're now in the "Lord of the Rings" era, after all, when computer-generated visuals go far beyond the relatively mild FX sported by E.T.'s escapades.

"E.T." is also an Earthbound movie, taking place in an everyday suburban neighborhood. The most buzzed-about recent fantasies, "The Fellowship of the Ring" and "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," bring us to otherworldly realms where exotic characters live in exotic surroundings.

Flamboyant fantasies were also popular 20 years ago, of course, and that's one reason why the initial success of "E.T." astonished even director Steven Spielberg.

He hadn't guessed his good-natured fantasy about a 10-year-old boy, a childlike space visitor, and an unlikely tagline – "E.T. phone home!" – would produce a starburst of such magnitude. Spielberg's surprise also stemmed from the difference between "E.T." and his earlier hits, which had followed somewhat different paths, although each had fantastic elements. "Jaws" was a horror flick. "Raiders of the Lost Ark" was an action-adventure romp.

Only the luminescent "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" had a similar set of interests, and in some ways "E.T." turns that film on its head: The mood is more intimate. The alien pops up at the beginning, rather than the end, of the story. And instead of a dad searching for his son, we meet a fatherless boy yearning for a kind of affection he misses in his jumbled suburban home. As critic Robert Kolker wrote in his book "A Cinema of Loneliness," in "E.T." Spielberg creates "two aliens, Elliott and the space creature, finding their way in the troublesome adult world."

The challenges of childhood are an enduring theme, which helps explain why "E.T." touched so many moviegoers. Spielberg stressed the movie's roots in his own youth when I discussed it with him in 1982. "There's lots of me in Elliott and lots of Elliott in me," he said with a smile. "I was a weird little outsider."

Seen from another perspective, "E.T." and "Close Encounters" marked a turning point in science-fiction filmmaking. Leaving aside the unique "2001: A Space Odyssey," most sci-fi movies of the '50s and '60s took a paranoid view of science and space. High-tech experiments produced monsters like the giant ants of "Them!" and the city-crushing "Godzilla."

Titles like "When Worlds Collide" and "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" described the fearful thrills of typical outer-space adventures. Even the buoyant "Star Wars" showed a galaxy split between amiable Earth-lovers and an evil Empire, locked in cold-war-style animosity.

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