This weekend the LoCo Drive-In is showing the movie E.T. the Extraterrestrial.
It's one of those movies that has become a part of our pop culture, but it wasn't always that way. When E.T. was released in 1982, it did fairly well at the box office but not spectacularly well. It took years for its popularity to grow, and by then Steven Spielberg had already moved on to other projects.
E.T. is a pretty simple story about a boy who meets an alien stranded on Earth and tries to help him get home while keeping his discovery secret from his family and friends. The film has no villain or conflict between characters; even when E.T.'s spaceship is discovered by government agents and they try to capture him, they're portrayed sympathetically as people trying to do their jobs despite having no idea what they're dealing with here on Earth (the scene where E.'s spaceship is being dismantled by government agents still manages to be heartbreaking). This isn't just a kid's movie — it's also a love letter from Spielberg to his own childhood in suburban California, which he depicts with such loving detail that it's easy for adults to feel nostalgic for their own childhoods when watching this movie
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