When Jeff Nichols set out to make 2016’s Midnight Special, his intention was to create a film about parenthood, the feelings of powerlessness that come with it, and the faith required to let your child be their own person in the world. When his son had a seizure at 8 months old, Nichols realized that he “had no real control over the health and well-being of [his] child.” Nichols took this emotional truth as the core of what he called a “weird, hybrid child” of films like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which he grew up watching. Just as in those movies and more modern Amblin releases like Super 8, Midnight Special revolves around a child holding a supernatural secret, pitted against the controlling forces of the government that are hellbent on stopping the kid from exposing the secret/discovering their freedom. Midnight Special is chock full of such energy, but Nichols’ movie stands out in major ways. By dialing back the sometimes zany pace of those films and replacing it with understated character growth that is empathetic toward — or at least fleshes out — the parents’ views, he creates something completely different. You’ll never look at the bumbling parents in E.T. the same way again.Many of the reviews at the time noted how confident Midnight Special was in limiting backstory and trusting the audience to connect the dots — a disorienting tactic that puts the focus on the characters. The opening scene drops viewers into the tense reality of two armed men sneaking a boy out of a rural Texas motel room into a truck, knowing nothing about the connections between any of these characters. You do not know what their intentions are and why this boy, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher, who later changed his name to Jaeden Martell), is on the run from a religious cult known as the Ranch. The leader of that cult is Pastor Calvin Meyer (a perfectly cast Sam Shepard in one of his last acting credits before he died in 2017). A National Security Agency (NSA) analyst played by a pre-Star Wars Adam Driver learns that Meyer is Alton’s adoptive father and was drawing his sermons from satellite transmissions that Alton had given him.Nichols has worked with Michael Shannon on almost all his films, so it is only logical that he is the star and the biological father at the core of the story, Roy Tomlin. Roy is fiercely protective of Alton and attentive to his many needs, which include not going into the sun (he is extremely photosensitive) and wearing blue goggles. He keeps him in his sight at almost all times as they flee both the FBI and the henchmen of the religious cult. His loyal friend, Lucas (Joel Edgerton), is there to help them, and he makes for an effective audience stand-in with his consistent confusion over Alton’s situation. There are not many words that pass between the taciturn Roy and his son, but the ones that do make it evident how much his commitment to guarding Alton comes from genuine love and not possessiveness. “I like worrying about you,” he tells his son at one point.When Alton’s biological mother and Roy’s ex, Sarah (Kirsten Dunst), joins the band of fugitives, she adds some needed dimension to this story about parenthood, since she had abandoned Alton when his powers grew. The ending really belongs to Dunst and her mastery of facial expressions, though many critics found that the second half of the film lacked the emotion that Nichols had claimed he wanted to convey. Perhaps more words could have been exchanged (Nichols himself admits that he doesn’t “like a lot of dialogue” because he prefers to write the kind of taciturn men that he grew up with in Arkansas), but you can still feel these characters pursuing their own vision of good parenting — no matter how warped. When you consider that they were all raised in an oppressive religious cult that preached about the end of the world, it’s a miracle that they can connect to their emotions at all.Midnight Special had a tiny budget of $23 million, but thanks to the reliance on an all-star cast and an attention to details from Nichols, it hardly shows. Though the 40-day shoot was mostly based in New Orleans, Nichols also shot a motel scene three hours away in Mississippi on the first day of production because there were apparently none of the “right kind of crappy motels” closer to the production office; they looked too much like chain motels, and he couldn’t get the specific sort of shot that he wanted in those places. It’s likely even more challenging to find those kinds of crappy motels today, but Nichols’ commitment to authenticity made Midnight Special all the more alive and textured.Since Midnight Special was released, its particular category of family-friendly UFO films have not had many additions that have compared with it. Steven Spielberg is the unrivaled grandfather of this genre, setting the rules, tone, and even approved resolutions. But Nichols adds an unexpected layer in the form of emotional complexity for characters that Spielberg’s child protagonists usually think of as antagonists. He switches the character growth from a straightforward story of kids finding freedom from parents to one that includes the psychological struggles of the adults around them. In both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Midnight Special, the central figures are drawn to aliens at the cost of their personal relationships. At the end of Midnight Special, the kid is alright — but are the parents? We leave them in an uncertain place, forced to come to peace with their kid’s divergence from their own lives. It’s the willingness to dwell in that uncertainty, though, that makes Midnight Special such a standout.'Midnight Special' on Blu-RayAmazon -