• Home
  • Movies
  • Music
  • TV
  • Video Games
  • Wrestling
  • Topics
  • Latest Comments on Cult of Whatever
Search
Cult of Whatever logo
  • Movies
    Featured
    • The Living Daylights: Timothy Dalton as James Bond

      The Living Daylights is still awesome, thirty-five years later

      By Matthew Martin
      | March 28, 2022
      Movie Blogs
    Recent
    • The Muppet Christmas Carol: Michael Caine as Scrooge

      The Muppet’s Christmas Carol remains the gold standard for the book

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 20, 2022
    • Nightmare Before Christmas 1993 1

      2022’s Christmas Movie Watchlist!

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 18, 2022
    • Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio Poster

      REVIEW: GDT’s Pinocchio is my favorite film of the year!

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 14, 2022
    • Troll: Ine Marie Wilmann as Nora

      REVIEWS: TROLL and TROLL HUNTER -A giant creature double feature!

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 5, 2022
    • Harry with The Hendersons

      Harry and the Hendersons is still awesome, thirty-five years later

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 1, 2022
    • Fantastic Four Poster

      The five best “rogues galleries” in superherodom! (part 3)

      By Matthew Martin
      | November 28, 2022
  • Music
    Random
    • Beach Boys Petsounds

      PET SOUNDS by the Beach Boys is a symphony of harmony and joy

      By Matthew Martin
      | August 2, 2016
      Music Blogs
    Recent
    • The Beatles: Get Back

      What GET BACK reveals about the Beatles

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 15, 2021
    • Simon And Garfunkel at Feyenoord Stadium in Rotterdam1982

      The Boxer is a song about being conned

      By Matthew Martin
      | July 4, 2021
    • Lady Gaga: Chromatica Album Cover

      Lady Gaga’s discography is totally out of order

      By Matthew Martin
      | June 3, 2021
    • Michael Jackson Thriller Album Cover

      Thirty years ago music fans said “Nevermind” to Michael Jackson

      By Matthew Martin
      | March 21, 2021
    • Queen II Album Cover

      On Queen’s The Miracle, and the importance of track ordering

      By Matthew Martin
      | February 16, 2021
    • Linda Paul Mccartney 1976

      50 years ago, McCartney dropped “Lennon” and went solo…

      By Matthew Martin
      | June 5, 2020
  • TV
    Featured
    • Big Sky S03e05: Kylie Bunbury, J. Anthony Pena and Katheryn Winnick as Cassie Dewell, Mo Poppernak and Jenny Hoyt

      Big Sky S03E05 Review: Flesh and Blood - Glamping!

      By Salome G
      | October 22, 2022
      TV Blogs
    Recent
    • Big Sky S03e10: Gang

      Big Sky S03E10 Review: A Thin Layer of Rock – Break time…

      By Salome G
      | December 11, 2022
    • Rick And Morty: S01e03

      Is Beth from Rick and Morty a bigger sociopath than Rick?

      By Jason Collins
      | December 7, 2022
    • Big Sky S03e09: Dedee Pfeiffer and Cree as Denise and Emily

      Big Sky S03E09: Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire – Stalling

      By Salome G
      | December 1, 2022
    • The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special: Dave Bautista and Pom Klementieff as Drax and Mantis

      REVIEW: The GOTG Holiday Special is a sweet prelude to next year’s finale

      By Matthew Martin
      | November 27, 2022
    • The Midnight Club S01: The Gang

      The Midnight Club S1 Review – A series of unfortunate events

      By Salome G
      | November 24, 2022
    • Big Sky S03e08: Reba McEntire as Sunny Barnes

      Big Sky S03E08 Review: Duck Hunting – I love a weirdo.

      By Salome G
      | November 19, 2022
  • Video Games
    Featured
    • Arkham Knight

      Batman: Arkham Knight - A fitting end to a trilogy

      By Tom Farr
      | July 18, 2015
      Video Game Reviews
    Recent
    • Splatoon 3 Screenshot

      A trio of Nintendo Switch reviews!

      By Matthew Martin
      | September 28, 2022
    • Nintendo Switch Logo

      Looking ahead to the Switch 2: Predictions and Wants

      By Matthew Martin
      | August 15, 2022
    • Legend Of Zelda

      Can a Legend of Zelda movie work?

      By Matthew Martin
      | April 6, 2022
    • Super Mario 64

      Which system had the better launch: A battle of four Nintendo consoles

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 1, 2021
    • Luigi's Mansion

      Happy twentieth to Nintendo’s underrated gem, the Gamecube

      By Matthew Martin
      | November 18, 2021
    • Metroid Dread

      Metroid Dread – Post Game analysis and sequel needs

      By Matthew Martin
      | October 29, 2021
  • Wrestling
    Featured
    • AEW All Out 2022: Keith Lee. Anthony Bowens, Max Caster and Billy Gunn

      AEW All Out 2022 - Review and (wild) Speculation!

      By Matthew Martin
      | September 5, 2022
      AEW
    Recent
    • article placeholder

      Which Is Better AEW vs WWE?

      By Coder
      | September 29, 2023
    • article placeholder

      Which Female Wrestler Leaves WWE?

      By Coder
      | September 29, 2023
    • article placeholder

      Which WWE Wrestler Had a Heart Attack?

      By Coder
      | September 29, 2023
    • article placeholder

      Which WWE Legend Recently Died?

      By Coder
      | September 29, 2023
    • article placeholder

      Which WWE Game Has the Best Story Mode?

      By Coder
      | September 29, 2023
    • article placeholder

      Which GM Should I Pick WWE 2K22?

      By Coder
      | September 29, 2023
  • Topics
    • site logo
    Latest
    • Which Is Better AEW vs WWE?
    • Which Female Wrestler Leaves WWE?
    • Which WWE Wrestler Had a Heart Attack?
    • Which WWE Legend Recently Died?
    • Which WWE Game Has the Best Story Mode?
    • Which GM Should I Pick WWE 2K22?

    E.T. is still awesome, thirty-five years later…

    By Matthew Martin
    | December 19, 2017
    Movie Blogs

    This year, Cult of Whatever is looking back on some of the great movies of 1982. It’s been thirty-five years since these films first captivated audiences. Some of them were blockbuster hits, while others needed a few years on home video to find their groove. Whatever their box office intake, these movies are genuine classics and deserve recognition.

    We started in January with Conan the Barbarian (see our stream of consciousness rewatch here) and then followed it up in February with TRON (look back on its legacy here). In March we reminisced about The Secret of NIMH, a classic fantasy from the legendary animator Don Bluth (click here to read all about it). In April we talked about the forgotten gem The Sword and the Sorcerer (we reflect on its overlooked history here), and in May we celebrated the great Jim Henson passion project, Dark Crystal (read all about it right here). June and July featured Sylvester Stallone hits, the First Rambo movie, First Blood, and the third Rocky movie, while August focused on the gem of the Star Trek movie franchise, The Wrath of Khan.

    In the fall we turned our attention to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece, Blade Runner, as well Steven Spielberg’s ghost-directed ghost-film, Poltergeist. Last month took us to the frozen wasteland of Antarctica and the special-effects mania of The Thing.

    Our series ends with a movie that’s not necessarily befitting the winter months; it came out in the middle of June, during the busiest summer of the 1980’s. Several of the movies previously discussed were released right around the same time as this one, but none of them had the impact of this one, none of them resonated with ticket-buyers like this one, and none of them made the bank that this one made:

    Et Poster

    Please indulge me.

    I am a lover of movies. I can sit down and watch Charlie Chaplin one minute, and switch over to Quentin Tarantino the next without batting an eye. I can enjoy schlock, tear-jerking drama, a brilliant spoof like Airplane, a juvenile indulgence like Ace Ventura, an epic like The Godfather or a light-hearted romp like The Mummy (1999). Nothing is off limits; as long as it does what it sets out to do I will enjoy it. As such it’s hard for me to list my “ten favorite movies of all time” because the entries change regularly. Those who follow this site know that my reviews tend to fall on one extreme or the other; I either hate a movie for failing to do anything, or I love a movie for accomplishing whatever goal it set out for itself. I love movies, so when a movie is done well I usually fall head over heels for it.

    But if you put a gun to my head and asked me to name my number-one favorite film, I would not hesitate. Numbers 2-10 may flip and flop but number one has been number one ever since I was a five year old boy at his grandmothers house, when someone turned on the TV and I saw a squatty little alien trick-or-treating with a butcher’s knife-murder-victim, a ghoul and a cowgirl. It was well past the half-way point in the film; I had no idea who anyone was, what was happening or why, but I was instantly enamored with the movie due to the perspective that Steven Spielberg used in shooting the trick-or-treat scene. He shot it through the eyes of the alien; you can even see the cut-out eye holes of his costume in front of the camera. Watching that moment unfold through his eyes allowed my five year old self (without understanding what was happening) to relate to something that is, on the surface, so ugly and…well, alien looking.

    After finishing the movie I insisted on seeing it again, this time from beginning to end. Thankfully my mother nurtured my love of film, and let me rent a movie from the video store every weekend. E.T. was the choice the next opportunity I had, and after seeing it again, I was hooked.

    I’ve probably seen the movie three hundred times since then, and I still fell the same sense of anticipation when Elliot tosses his baseball into the dark unknown only to have it be tossed back. I still feel the same tight-chested sense of dread when the astronauts storm Eliott’s house looking for E.T. And I have no shame in saying I still well-up with tears when the bikes go flying and John Williams’ score swells to its beautiful crescendo. I’m a little teary eyed just typing it

    E.T. is rightly considered—by critics and “unbiased” reviewers, rankers, and observers—one of the finest films ever made. It’s one of the rare examples of a movie that dominated the box office, struck a chord with movie goers but also was not a cheap movie that relied on the lowest common denominator of humor or storytelling. The Transformers movies have done huge box office too, but no one’s shedding tears about Bumblebee.

    Et Extra Terrestrial 1

    E.T. is a great and highly acclaimed movie to everyone else. It deserved all the awards and recognition it received. To me, it could have been a flop and I wouldn’t care. E.T. is not a movie to me, it’s a time machine. It’s a little window to my childhood, to the sights and sounds of the simpler, happier, era that existed when I came into this world. It’s a movie about a boy who makes a friend and in the end has to say goodbye when his mom comes to pick him up to go home. It’s so primal, so simple, so rudimentary, in lesser hands it might have been ruined with cheesy dialogue, over the top try-hard drama and emotional beats that missed the mark. Instead it was handled with care by the only director who could have made it work, the only director to understand how to package and deliver “child-like wonder” as effortlessly as a trumpet player can play taps.

    Other reviewers can talk about Spielberg’s directorial decisions, and praise his camera choices from a clinical, unbiased reviewers perspective. I can’t do that. The movie is too attached to my soul. As a child I didn’t notice that most of the movie was framed from Eliott’s four-foot perspective, where much of the camera work is waist-high (for adults) and where every major emotional beat happens through Eliott or his siblings and not an adult. When he’s lost and near death we see his mother panic but we see it as his little sister sees it. When E.T. comes back to life we experience the joy through the reaction of his older brother. When we must focus on an adult, such as the mysterious “keys” who is hunting the alien, the framing is always distant, tilted upward, as though we are quiet children; companions of Eliott watching everything unfold beside him. If you watched the movie for the first time as an adult, you’d probably shrug and say “yeah that makes sense; what’s the big deal?” It’s hard to appreciate it for the first time as a thirty-year old, but as a five year old it resonates in ways that aren’t going to be understood by a mind that young. But even though a child can’t understand it, he can definitely feel it. As the movie is played through a child’s eyes, the child watching doesn’t just watch it; he experiences it vicariously.

    I felt it. It’s been almost thirty years since I felt it for the first time, but I’m thankful I was exposed to it when I was. It has stuck with me all this time. I’ve carried it through elementary school, through high school and college, into adulthood and parenthood and have passed it on to my children, who have had the same wide-eyed terror at the astronauts that I had, the same chuckles at the “release the frogs” scene as I had, and the same palpable euphoria that I had when I first watched with child-like wonder, as bicycles took to the sky.

    E.T. is still awesome, thirty-five years later, and as long as I live it will stay that way too.

    Tags

    1982 MoviesE.T.Sci-Fi MoviesSteven Spielberg

    COMMENTS

    Please read our Commenting Policy before you join in with the discussion.

    Note: If you have email notifications enabled, please check your email spam folders to ensure emails are not missed.

    Subscribe
    Connect withD
    I allow to create an account
    When you login first time using a Social Login button, we collect your account public profile information shared by Social Login provider, based on your privacy settings. We also get your email address to automatically create an account for you in our website. Once your account is created, you'll be logged-in to this account.
    DisagreeAgree
    Notify of
    guest

    Connect withD
    I allow to create an account
    When you login first time using a Social Login button, we collect your account public profile information shared by Social Login provider, based on your privacy settings. We also get your email address to automatically create an account for you in our website. Once your account is created, you'll be logged-in to this account.
    DisagreeAgree
    guest

    6 Comments
    Inline Feedbacks
    View all comments
    Drewsi
    Drewsi
    3 years ago

    E.T. was fantastic! I would watch it today if I could. I admit I teared up a little back in the day. I would handle it better now. I wonder if my kids would love it as much as I did.

    0
    Reply
    KeeperofUnicornsD
    KeeperofUnicorns
    5 years ago

    I never liked this movie, but my kids adore it. I just found the family dynamics sad and the government chasing and searching for E.T. to be unbelievable.

    0
    Reply
    Lone Wolf
    Lone Wolf
    5 years ago
    Reply to  KeeperofUnicorns

    I don’t find the government searching for E.T. to be unbelievable at all, in fact, given what we know about our government today it seems even more plausible. I have not seen E.T. as an adult, but I remember it well as a child. I think many a kid had little issue identifying with Elliott. I must watch it again.

    0
    Reply
    PoisonIvy
    PoisonIvy
    5 years ago

    I recently went to visit my sister and my 8 year old niece was watching this movie. It is her favorite movie currently, and that, to me, just speaks to the timelessness of E.T. I loved the movie when I was a kid her age, and I love that it’s just as popular with her.

    0
    Reply
    Gavin the BingeWatcherD
    Gavin the BingeWatcher
    5 years ago

    The astronaut scene is intense! As a child I stood up the entire time clutching my older brother’s hand in absolute terror. I just checked and it is available on Netflix. Sounds good for after work.

    0
    Reply
    ArabellaD
    Arabella
    5 years ago

    I cried like a baby during this movie more than once. Kindness translates across all barriers – no matter the species. This is the first time I’ve heard about the camera work. I’ll have to watch it again to see if my adult self can tell a difference.

    0
    Reply

    You might also like

    • REVIEW: Close Encounters of the Third Kind is (still) magical

      By Matthew Martin
      | September 4, 2017
    • TRON is still awesome, 35 years later…

      By Matthew Martin
      | February 16, 2017
    • Blade Runner is still awesome, thirty-five years later…

      By Matthew Martin
      | September 25, 2017
    • CONAN THE BARBARIAN is still awesome, 35 years later…

      By Matthew Martin
      | January 9, 2017
    • Dark Crystal is still awesome, 35 years later…

      By Matthew Martin
      | May 25, 2017
    • (Rambo) First Blood is still awesome, 35 years later

      By Matthew Martin
      | June 25, 2017
    • Rocky III is still awesome, thirty-five years later…

      By Matthew Martin
      | July 25, 2017
    • Star Trek II is still awesome thirty-five years later…

      By Matthew Martin
      | August 25, 2017
    • The Secret of NIMH is still awesome, 35 years later…

      By Matthew Martin
      | March 12, 2017
    • The Sword and the Sorcerer is still awesome, 35 years later…

      By Matthew Martin
      | April 27, 2017
    • The Thing is still awesome, thirty-five years later…

      By Matthew Martin
      | November 21, 2017
    • Poltergeist is still awesome, thirty-five years later…

      By Matthew Martin
      | October 25, 2017

    FIND THE TOPICS YOU WANT...

    Movie Topics

    Recommended for you

    • REVIEW: GDT’s Pinocchio is my favorite film of the year!

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 14, 2022
    • REVIEWS: TROLL and TROLL HUNTER -A giant creature double feature!

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 5, 2022
    • Harry and the Hendersons is still awesome, thirty-five years later

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 1, 2022
    • The five best “rogues galleries” in superherodom! (part 3)

      By Matthew Martin
      | November 28, 2022
    • Spirited Away remains Studio Ghibli’s “greatest” film

      By Matthew Martin
      | October 16, 2022
    • Read the Book Instead: The most disappointing book-to-film adaptations

      By Oliver Johnston
      | September 20, 2021
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Affiliate Disclosure
    • Cookie Policy and Settings
    • Terms of Use
    • Photo Credits
    • RSS
    All Cult of Whatever articles, logos, illustrations and graphics are copyright CultOfWhatever.com. All other trademarks, logos and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. © 2023 CultOfWhatever. All Rights Reserved.
    • facebook
    • twitter
    wpDiscuz