ET: loving the alien

(Or: the incredible true story of how, 20 years ago, a geeky little extra-terrestrial became stranded in an American suburb and changed our world for ever)

If you want to understand just what Steven Spielberg achieved when he made ET, you should spare a thought for those who missed out on its achievement. Take the marketing men for Milk Duds as an almost mythic example. Offered the chance to have their confectionery feature in Spielberg's next project, the executives took a long, sensible look at its central character and declined. The little alien was "unappetising", they said – in one of the great bad calls of commercial history – and couldn't be relied upon to increase sales of the product.

You can see their point. Looked at dispassionately, ET resembles an agglomeration of Milk Duds that have spent several days in an eight-year-old's back pocket. How could they know that dispassionate viewing was going to prove impossible, and that Reece's Pieces, which took up the offer, would increase sales by 65 per cent on the back of the film? And when Shelley Long turned down the role of Elliott's mother in favour of a part in Caveman – what might have alerted her to the fact that she'd bet on the wrong gonk?

Best of all, what about Columbia – the studio that had first refusal on one of the biggest grossing movies of all time but put the project into turnaround after market research suggested that its audience appeal would be limited? As it happened, Columbia retained a 5 per cent stake in the net profits of ET – a slice that was to earn them more money than almost all of the films they actually made that year – but would you count that as consolation or salt in the wound?

Twenty years on from ET's first landing, the point of these stories is not to glory complacently in hindsight – it's to scrabble back to a time when the film wasn't part of the landscape at all, and when these judgements made perfect commercial sense. Because this was still a time when Spielberg wasn't perceived as infallible (he'd just had a record-breaking flop with 1941), and when a sentimental chamber piece didn't seem to offer any realistic prospect of commercial return. Those were common-sense truths that ET was to overturn, but there could be no shame in not predicting it because, even on Spielberg's terms, the ambitions for ET were modest.

It remains a film best defined by paradoxes – and the first of them is this: ET was a movie that got huge by thinking small. The special visual atmosphere of the film – the enclosed, almost claustrophobic way in which it plays out in backyards and bedrooms – was due to a very conscious decision to pull back from epic spectacle. The film hugs itself close around a wounded sensibility – that of Spielberg himself – and even he was probably surprised by just how many people felt themselves enclosed by its embrace.

The luminous benevolence of Spielberg's film – the visible glow of need it gives off – had its origins in something far darker. The director had been working on a follow-up to Close Encounters, a project called Night Skies, in which the aliens would be more hostile, the action more violent. The film-maker John Sayles actually produced a first-draft script that featured extraterrestrials who could kill with a finger's touch, and just one amiable alien called Buddy, who is stranded when the spaceship leaves in the final frames.

When he started working on the material, though, Spielberg realised that he couldn't face anything this harsh in tone – and he took Sayles's grace note as the beginning of a different film. The malignity intended for Night Skies was diverted into Poltergeist, and the new project unfolded as something far gentler and more intimate. Spielberg had been scalded by the costly disaster of 1941, and he wanted to get away from elaborate special effects (the budget for ET was just $10m and Spielberg was determined to stick to it). He knew, too, that this was to be a very personal story – one that looked back at his own childhood in the suburbs, when he had to deal with his parents' divorce and his own sense of isolation (the film is filled with barely digested souvenirs of Spielberg's youth – from Elliott's use of a light bulb to fool his mother into thinking he has a temperature, to the chaotic liberation of the frogs during a school dissection class).

"It's the most emotionally complicated film I've ever made," said Spielberg at the time. "And the least technically complicated." What Spielberg had understood was that there are aliens on Earth, too – light years from comfort, desperate to get a message out to someone that can understand them. Which introduces the second defining paradox. ET was a coming-of-age movie for Spielberg, a film in which he set aside Hollywood toys in favour of something more substantial. And, characteristically of Spielberg, he chose to grow up by returning to childhood – by exploring his own youthful hunger for emotional contact and his own timidity about emotional expression. When Elliott's brother yells at him, "Why don't you grow up! Think how other people feel for a change", it's tempting to hear it as an aftershock of Spielberg's own failed relationships up to this point. The line is a self-accusation, and ET is his plea in mitigation. Be patient, I'm getting there. At the time, it was the most adult movie he'd made – and yet it was unabashedly aimed at children. (There's a good case to be made that in shaking off his own immaturity, Spielberg effectively infantilised Hollywood for decades – but that's another story and one that's perhaps not appropriate for a festivity.)

ET himself encapsulates some of these contradictions. He is both 900 years old and an infant, a geriatric pre-schooler. He easily rigs up an interplanetary communication device using electronic toys and tin foil, but teeters around the house like a toddler taking its first steps. Even his features are a hybrid of age and youth. The story has it that in working towards a suitable face, Spielberg took a photo of a baby and then pasted on the eyes of the poet Carl Sandburg, the forehead and nose of Hemingway and Einstein.

ET is a jerry-built machine for extracting human emotions, in short – and from the very earliest screenings it was evident that it worked with almost unnerving efficiency. Universal's Sidney Sheinberg recalled his first viewing as a moment of conversion: "It was like a religious experience," he said. "It must be a bit like the way people feel if they've seen God." A cynic might point out that studio heads are always devout when they encounter the kind of miraculous cash-flows ET produced (at one time, it was calculated, Spielberg was earning half a million dollars a day as his cut of the box-office take). On the other hand, even cynics found themselves succumbing to this film. When it was screened at Cannes, the audience of critics responded like eight-year-olds, shouting with glee at the film's most reliable moment of exaltation – when the children's bikes soar above the hapless cops.

It isn't easy to say what it was about the film that allowed it to penetrate those well-armoured sensibilities. ET was not a perfect film by any means, and Spielberg's new cut hasn't perfected it (there are some minor additions – a bit of bathtub slapstick, and the mother searching for Elliott in the forest – as well as one significant excision). Like most fairy-tales, it's vulnerable to even the most diluted wash of logic. Elliott's house, for example, must be the only suburban home with its own corn field – a location it is impossible to square with the hilly scrub we see in daylight, but which provides a perfect venue for Elliott and ET's meeting. That misty garden is a purely synthetic space. When the space-suited technicians break in, they advance like Karloff's mummy, in a scene that is risibly devoid of menace to anyone over the age of seven.

And the film is self-indulgent, too – when ET sees a child dressed up as Yoda, he toddles towards him croaking "Home" – a knowing gag that undercuts the guileless sincerity of the film. But none of these quibbles are likely to survive the final ascension the film has in store for us. At the very beginning, one of the boys playing a board game around Elliott's kitchen table, mutters, "It's like life – you don't win at life". ET gives the lie to that cynicism by supplying an undeniable victory – one that involves another self-contradiction.

ET is an odd thing – a tongue-tied film about the importance of emotional communication. At least part of its power is generated by this friction between richness of feeling and poverty of expression. The film has a curious relationship to speech; the adults in the film are preternaturally silent. In the opening sequence, the men advance wordlessly – there are no cries of "There he goes!" as they hunt – just those menacing torch beams.

What's more, it's a long time before Elliott and ET exchange words, and when they do it's a clumsy business – fraught with misunderstanding and awkwardness. They don't need a shared vocabulary because they enjoy a telepathic empathy – when ET is startled, Elliott jumps. But tellingly, they don't leave their feelings unspoken at the end – even if logic insists they already know what the other is feeling. Their "dialogue" here scarcely merits the word. It is a matter of monosyllables, and yet it is powerfully eloquent. The "Ouch!" in particular is both twee and perfect – childishly inadequate to the scale of the feeling and yet unimprovable. It's usually here that even the most resistant viewer will finally surrender.

One of the things that Spielberg has taken away from the film are the shotguns carried by the policemen who stand in the way of the boys' bicycles. The close-up of a weapon has gone and the guns have been digitally erased, leaving the men empty-handed. Spielberg says he always regretted their inclusion in the original, but it's hard to think of a more needless alteration. This is a film that has been disarming the hostile for 20 years – and it didn't need computer graphics to do it.

'ET The Extra-Terrestrial – The 20th Anniversary' is released tomorrow