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In The New York Times, screenwriter Melissa Mathison recalled, "I always thought of E.T. as very, very old, and Steven [Spielberg], I think, always thought of him as young. We were striving to achieve ideas about responsibility, about unconditional love, about the unimportance of appearance, and communicating on a deeper level."

For grownups, the appeal of Elliott's childlike faith is undeniable, unstained by cynicism and selfishness. We fear for his fragile love and his ability to communicate with the alien; adolescence approaches. Elliott's older brother is already struggling to hold on to his faith, and the grownups are almost uniformly hard-hearted, evil, and brutal toward children and harmless aliens.

For me, the film appeals to our basic human desire to defy one of Mom and Dad's primary rules: "Don't talk to strangers." Sure, the folks meant well—they wanted me to be safe in case a villain came hunting children in the neighborhood. But how many friendships did I fail to establish as a result? How much warmth, truth, and love have children missed because they have been taught to fear strangers or people who are different? As grownups in the city, we pass each other without eye contact or greetings, scurrying like ants (to borrow a metaphor from Richard Linklater's recent animated work Waking Life).

But in E.T., Elliott ventures out into the back yard at night to offer candy to a homeless person, striving to discern his needs. The boy has needs too. The movie never names them, but the absence of Elliott's father makes a strong suggestion. Most of Spielberg's films, in fact, show families without fathers, or fathers who are cold, distant, manipulative, and jaded. In A.I., there is an undercurrent of anger, as the fatherly inventor of a child robot justifies his callousness by describing God as the first neglectful father. E.T., on the other hand, is the friend, savior, and father figure who stays faithful.

The friendship of alien and boy will last forever, we're told, but instead of making an earthling of E.T., the relationship makes an alien of Elliott—he becomes more aware of the cruel world around him, and desires to escape the terrifying, claustrophobia-inducing evils of grownup rationality, suspicion, fear, and violence. When Elliott watches E.T. heading home, we know he wishes he were going along. We feel the tug as well. We're strangers in a strange land.

There's another inhuman savior on screens this week, but this one saves with a bloody sword. Blade 2, directed by Guillermo del Toro (The Devil's Backbone) pits the half-man, half-vampire hero (Wesley Snipes) against a new enemy: mutant vampires called the Reapers.

In the original, Blade's vampire qualities were held at bay with the help of his guide Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), and together they worked to resist that wholly vampiric Nosferatus. The Reapers are worse, feeding on both humans and vampires and threatening both with extinction. Thus Blade has to join forces with his old enemies to stand a chance. Roger Ebert describes the scene: "This news is conveyed by a vampire leader whose brain can be dimly seen through a light blue translucent plastic shell, more evidence of the design influence of the original iMac." Chaotic, stylish, indulgent violence follows, choreographed like ballet, delighting action fans and troubling those who are worried about the excess of bloodshed on today's movie screens.

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March (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46