Royal Albert Hall, June 14 2018

Steven Spielberg’s 1977 science fiction classic about UFOs in Indiana brought to life on the big screen at the Royal Albert Hall with the assistance of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the English Chamber Choir, conducted by Ernst Van Tiel.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of those films. The type that everyone has seen. The type that even non-genre fans will have watched at some point in their lives. Spielberg’s work tends to transcend artificial boundaries of genre and age, and this movie is no exception.

That said, it’s years since the one and only time I had seen the movie, and this meant that seeing it in this setting was almost akin to watching it for the very first time, and what an experience that was. Scored by John Williams, the movie never strikes you as one particularly heavy on soundtrack, and that’s because it isn’t. There are fairly long stretches of the film with little to no score at all, the director and composer recognising that sometimes scenes are more powerful when there is no music at all.

Equally, that means when the music does kick in, it kicks in hard, rousing, swelling brass, woodwind and strings combining to bring scenes to dramatic crescendo and punctuate the action. As usual with these performances, so note perfect was the contribution of the orchestra and choir that it was entirely possible to lose oneself completely in the spectacle of the movie and forget that they were there. The best example of just how perfectly integrated with the movie the performers were was that neither myself nor my companion for the evening were able to work out – even with close observation – whether the orchestra themselves were playing the bars of that iconic ‘hello’ sound that the human scientists tap out on a keyboard to communicate with the UFOs in the final act.

Like all the best Spielberg, it’s a mesmerising, magical film, whose visual effects have held up surprisingly well to this day. The live performance of orchestra and choir amplified that feeling tenfold, from the delicate, barely noticeable strings in quieter moments to the glorious voices of the choir adding a sense of wonder to the spectacle parts.

And it’s a film that not only holds up, but rather shows up the modern blockbusters involving aliens to this day. This is a story of wonder, of the drive of man to discover more about the universe, and of the humility in finding it. There’s no cynicism and no suggestions of intergalactic conflict. The aliens here are playful, curious creatures who obviously mean no harm, the military and scientists who come to observe them equally driven by an inquisitive need to know more. It’s also a film that has a sense of humour – something else I simply hadn’t remembered – and that effect is amplified when sitting in a large auditorium of people all laughing together at the jokes.  In short, it’s a film that feels all the more relevant in today’s world, and it was an absolute joy to watch in this format.

Verdict: The combination of such a powerfully written score and such a note-perfect live performance of it elevated this even beyond the stellar quality of the movie itself. A close encounter I’ll always be grateful to have had. 10/10

Greg D. Smith