THIS MEANS SOMETHING, THIS IS IMPORTANT

Part of the charm of Spielberg's film's and part of the reason I think they are so popular is the way he uses cinema as a form of communication. No filmmaker other than perhaps Chaplin has used cinema to express such universal emotions. No other Spielberg film has perfectly demonstrated a need to break the language barrier better than "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". In it the main character completely breaks ties with his family who can no longer understand his obsession with alien spacecrafts, and the one person who can best understand him is a french scientist who can barely speak English. The climactic scene with the alien mothership becomes an allegory about understanding through a common bond. In this case the common bond is music. This is one of Spielberg's most personal and hopeful statements.