For that, Spielberg commissioned Melissa Mathison, who’d previously written The Black Stallion, another spare children’s drama about the connection between a little boy and an orphaned creature. The storybook simplicity of the film is key. Elliott grows up at a breathlessly accelerated rate. (Many adults fail to learn it.) Spielberg conceived a science-fiction fantasy where a boy literally feels what another being feels, and the bond between them is overwhelmingly powerful. They understand how events affect them, but empathy is a learned trait, part of the same slow developmental process that teaches them to walk and read and fend for themselves. A child of divorce himself, Spielberg is uniquely perceptive about how kids are sensitive, vulnerable, innocent creatures who feel the world intensely, but are also naturally solipsistic. And that’s why it’s been extracting tears from audiences so effectively for 40 years. Thinking about others is what ET is about.
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