Even Closer Encounters of the Third Kind: Seeing a Classic in 70mm

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There is something inherently otherworldly about escaping into the parallel universe of a film, especially on a screen as gigantic as your line of vision, with sound that wraps around your head and vibrates through your chest. It’s less a viewing than an immersion, a surrender to something vast. My first encounter with Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was the exact opposite of that. I pressed play on a compact 13-inch airplane TV, the glow dulled by fluorescent cabin light, the sound muffled through half-broken earbuds. Within the first three minutes, I realized I was betraying the film. This was not how it was meant to be seen.

Spielberg’s operatic display of awe, paranoia, and cosmic connection demanded magnitude that an in-flight movie simply couldn’t provide.

On August 29, 2025, that long-suspended promise finally came true. I sat in the velvet seats of New York’s historic Paris Theater, watching the 70mm New York premiere of the newly restored, director-approved version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It was the opening night of the theater’s now-iconic “Big & Loud” series, a four-week marathon of cinema’s most enveloping sensory experiences. The lineup is almost mythological in its own right: Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Forman’s Amadeus, Nolan’s Interstellar, Glazer’s Under the Skin, and so many more. To kick off the entire series, Spielberg’s masterpiece of awe and contact, unfolding for the first time on 70mm in New York City.

The Paris Theater itself feels like an artifact from another world. Opened in 1948, it has the kind of old-world elegance rare in a city that is constantly tearing itself down and rebuilding. It was originally commissioned to showcase achievements in foreign film, and over the decades it became a sanctuary for cinephiles, a shrine to the belief that cinema should be experienced not privately but collectively. Now under Netflix’s stewardship, the theater doubles as both a monument and a living space, a room where history breathes and where old films are reborn.

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To watch Close Encounters here was to understand why cinema needs to be large. The desert storm opening swallowed the room, the rumbling bass of UFO engines shook the seats, the iconic five-note musical phrase rang out like a coded hymn, echoing from wall to wall. Scenes I once watched in miniature now bloomed into overwhelming force.

Though it hides in the shadows of Spielberg’s canon, overshadowed by the populist glow of E.T. and the blockbuster reign of Jaws, Close Encounters is his dark horse of sorts, the rare sci-fi epic that is equal parts spectacle and spiritual yearning. Its cult following has always known this, that the film is about the inexplicable pull toward something greater, and the way ordinary lives fracture when faced with the extraordinary.

The film follows Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), a blue-collar worker whose world tilts off its axis after a blinding brush with a UFO. From that moment on, he’s haunted by visions of a strange mountain shape, sculpting it obsessively out of mashed potatoes, dirt, even the trash scattered across his living room floor. At the same time, Jillian (Melinda Dillon), a single mother, is searching for her young son Barry, who has been mysteriously carried off by the same otherworldly visitors. Their paths bend toward Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, the jagged rock formation that reveals itself as the meeting place between humans and whatever waits in the sky.

What struck me most watching it is how timeless the film feels, how its pulse isn’t really about spaceships or abductions at all, but about the miraculous power of communication. Spielberg seems to be saying that music, shape, color, even pure frequency, things outside of language, are enough to bridge the unbridgeable. That fragile connection hums at the heart of the film, softening terror into awe.

As the extraterrestrial visitors rattle Jillian and Barry’s little house, force and color streaming through vents, the stove erupting, light flooding in through the keyhole, she clutches her son and curls into the corner of the kitchen. The scene is terror and wonder braided together, a reminder of how defenseless we are against the mysteries that brush against our world. Mystery can paralyze us or pull us in, and Barry chooses the latter. He slips from his mother’s arms and runs straight into the blaze of the unknown, swallowed by its brilliance, maybe never to return. His curiosity is larger than fear.

Sitting beside me, my partner (who calls Close Encounters his favorite film of all time) shared that he’s always seen Barry as Spielberg himself, a child breaking free of safety to chase the incomprehensible, running headlong into awe. It feels true. That small body sprinting into the floodlight could just as easily be the boy Spielberg once was, hurling himself into the boundlessness of cinema for the first time, the sheer intensity of creative obsession. Once you’ve glimpsed another world, even for a second, how can you ever return unchanged?

Slipping out of the Paris Theater and into the subway, where everyone’s heads are downturned toward their little phones, scrolling endlessly, I think about scale and stories. Scale matters because Close Encounters is not a story that can be contained. Its very subject is enormity, the intrusion of something vast and inexplicable into the fabric of everyday life. On a laptop screen, that enormity shrinks, another file in a queue. This is the age where entire movies are being shrunk into 60-second TikToks, and churned out like content. I fall asleep next to a movie rolling on my laptop. So often, now, our days are a succession of screens, that they have lost their true and transformative intention, to truly act as a portal into another world. The texture of Close Encounters depends on its ability to overwhelm you.

Of course, there’s the collective dimension to this experience as well. Alone at home, it is just you and the film. But in the theater, the experience multiplies, from the shared gasp when the UFO crests the horizon, the hushed silence as the five notes echo back and forth, the nervous laughter when Roy loses himself to obsession, sitting beside the person you love, seeing a shimmer of their childlike wonder reflected back to them. Close Encounters, now made even closer, is so much about connection across fear, across distance. It’s simply wonderful when that connection extends to the strangers sitting beside you.

Audrey Weisburd is an arts and culture writer from Austin, Texas, currently living in Brooklyn. She also writes short fiction and poetry. She shares her work on Instagram @audrey.valentine.