Erin Harrington reviews E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial in Concert, performed by the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Northey, at the Douglas Lilburn Auditorium, the Christchurch Town Hall, 24 February 2024.
Few films define the 1980s more than Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), which centres on the relationship between 10-year-old Elliot (Henry Thomas) and a wrinkly, sweet-natured alien botanist who’s been left behind by his kin. The film charts Elliot’s quest to get E.T. back to his family, with help from his older brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and kid sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore), all while government forces try to take the alien for themselves.
Similarly, few soundtracks define this era of Hollywood music-making more than John Williams’ multi-award-winning orchestral score. The Christchurch Symphony Orchestra’s terrific performance of the film-in-concert embraces the score’s lush sentimentality, offbeat comedy, and eerie otherness, opening in a quiet, unobtrusive mode, and unfurling as the stakes escalate. The orchestra brings the enraptured audience along with it, creating a powerfully emotional collective experience for the little kids and the grown-ups alike.
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is so much funnier, scarier, weirder, and in love with the history of film than I’d remembered. Anyone familiar with the film, or at least its elevated status in pop culture, can rattle off some of the film’s greatest hits: Elliot discovers E.T. in the garden shed, rolling a baseball out in front of cornstalks and having it roll right back. Gerties screams, often. E.T. falls down, gets drunk, and acts like a genial chaos demon. Gertie dresses E.T. up as a very pretty lady. E.T. goes trick-or-treating. Michael and his friends play Dungeons and Dragons (and smoke, hello 1982). E.T. levitates balls to illustrate his home planet, and heals a cut on Elliot’s hand with his own luminous fingertip. E.T. wants to phone home. I’d pretty much wiped the awful medical sequences from my brain, as well as the image of a near-death E.T. lying in a culvert like a dirty, wet paper bag. I had also forgotten that almost all of the adults bar the kids’ loving but strained single mother Mary (Dee Wallace) remain faceless until near the end, centring us on the rich world of the children. It’s a film that made a very specific suburban American setting, and a particular type of free-range childhood, feel like a cultural touchstone.
It is also perhaps the best example of Spielberg’s fascination not just with childhood, but with re-enchantment – how the experience of something extraordinary can connect us in new ways with the world and each other, and how film audiences might sympathetically and collectively share in those moments and be transported. See, for instance, the classic ‘Spielberg face’, the iconic look of wonder and surrender that acts as Spielberg’s signature:
This sense of transportation is apparent throughout the concert. In his opening preamble, conductor Benjamin Northey encourages us to clap, engage, and cheer, but honestly most of the audience is far too engrossed to applaud the end of movements – which is a compliment, if anything. Exceptions are the film’s truly iconic moments. The audience erupts during the lyric swelling of the epic “flying” theme as Elliot and E.T. ride their bicycle across the sky and are silhouetted against the moon. This is echoed later during the skyward climax of the film’s mesmerising, frantic chase scene, as cop cars and feds try to chase down the kids across the dusty, hilly Californian small town, a scene that sparked the ‘kids on bikes’ subgenre. It’s absolutely exhilarating: aggressive brass and sweeping string themes compete for dominance before slamming together in a moment of jubilant astonishment as the kids and E.T. fly their bikes into the sunset and away from danger:
One of the joys of these concerts is that we’re able to pay much more attention to the score as a storytelling device. The pleasures of watching, and listening carefully: hearing one of the first introductions of the film’s key theme on flute as ET jams a toy car into his mouth; noticing how John Williams riffs on his own contemporaneous scores for Star Wars (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1981), which mimics the children’s own pop culture-inflected engagement with the world; feeling the odd buzz of the yearning, polytonal phrases that express the alien nature of the extra-terrestrial visitors; recognising the madcap comedy of the trombones as E.T., drunk, bumbles his way through the house like Elliot’s id; seeing the conversation between flute and French horn across the ensemble, and the feathered gestures of the harpist during the moments of wonder and sympathetic connection between ET and Elliot; feeling the crash of cymbal and timpani in climactic moments designed to emotionally zap you right your in lizard brain.
Overall, it’s a transformative evening – a pure example of the power of cinema and music as communal experiences, through the lens of a classic film that finely balances the sweet, the funny, the scary, and the sentimental. It’s also quite a different experience, tonally, to last year’s performance of Back to the Future; that a cult film far more participatory and action-packed, this a film more like a tearful rush of oxytocin. The orchestra itself is well-balanced, although the ensemble overwhelms the dialogue in dynamic scenes leading to the film’s climax, but that doesn’t impact the experience overall. It’s properly magical. By the end my friend is so striken she cries through the last 10 minutes, at least, much like half the people around us. The auditorium feels tightly wound as E.T. and Elliot farewell one another, tapping their hearts and saying ‘ouch’. The score leads us to the film’s final, joyful, cathartic fanfare, and there an extended ovation throughout the credits as people cheer and cry.
You can hear nothing but praise as people pour out of the Town Hall, from grown ups revisiting a childhood classic, to kids who’ve just had their wee minds blown. I love these films-in-concert and it’s clear others do too. Such shared experiences are hard to find in the age of entertainment on-demand, and so much more valuable because of that, so I hope the CSO continues to offer this brand of cinematic magic in the future.
Flat City Field Notes 