Back when the movie came out in the theaters a coworker took her little girl to see the movie. She said the theater got really quiet during the ET death scene. Then her daughter started crying, and she said that triggered a blubbering all over the room, as other kids broke down too.
I was whatever age Drew Barrymore was (6? 7?), and I was horribly traumatized by it. I couldn’t go into our basement without screaming, because we had a big deep freeze that reminded me of dead ET. The screaming didn’t last long, but the anxiety persisted well into junior high.
But I think my reaction was unusually strong, for whatever reason. It’s rated PG.
Yes, but then wasn’t there cheering when ET revived? And then there was the scene in which all of the bikes were levitated.
It’s nice that we can see almost any movie we want at home whenever we want but I think we also miss something in not seeing a movie with others.
From the moment E.T. arrived, breathed our air, ate our Reece’s Pieces and got drunk off that six-pack of Coors he found in the fridge, he was doomed. E.T. was undone, destroyed, after all of man’s weapons and walky-talkies had failed, by the tiniest creatures that God in his wisdom put upon this earth. By the toll of a billion box office ticket sales, man had earned his immunity, his right to survive among this planet’s limited number of Steven Spielberg plot devices.