Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of those rare movies that you can revisit every few years and experience in a gorgeous new light and not just because there's a new edition that often. When I was a kid and I saw it for the first time, I remember being blown away by the very base concept - aliens visiting Earth and communicating with us. It's the kind of film that made kids look at the skies differently and opened up a generation of imaginations. It's one of the most influential films of all time if you think about how much of science fiction stole its basic concepts over the last three decades. Without Close Encounters, Mulder and Scully certainly wouldn't be the same and neither would literally hundreds of Sci-fi Channel programs and movies.

Seeing the film again now, several decades older than the first time I saw it, I have a whole new appreciation for the masterpiece. It no longer plays like a fantasy of other worlds. Now I can appreciate the human tones, not the alien ones. It's the believability of the humans that make the alien experiences so powerful. Close Encounters seamlessly blends so many different themes - faith, distrust in government, commitment to a task, music as communication, and so many more - that aren't often seen in sci-fi, even today. It doesn't wink at the audience. Spielberg followed the oft-cited words of its lead, Roy Neary - "This means something. This is important." He took the fantastic and made it seem real. Movies would never be the same.

Neither would DVD, if simply for the fact that Close Encounters has been released almost as often as Evil Dead or The Princess Bride. It's one of those films that has been constantly dragged from the vaults and sold again to another generation. Is this version worth the upgrade? For those of you with tight holiday spending budgets, I'm a little sorry to say that it is, especially if you have a Blu-ray player because it's the first Spielberg film available in that format. For us standard DVD viewers, it's still worth the double dip because it's such a complete look at the film. The box set comes with three discs - the original cut, never before available on any home market (even VHS), the special edition cut, and the director's cut. I haven't done so yet (I watched the director's cut), but I know that before long, I'll have watched all three variations on Close Encounters. It's interesting to see how the film changed over the years with a nip here and a tuck there and, in a move that all director's cut DVDs should follow, the set comes with a poster that details the differences between each version. So many director's cuts make it impossible to tell exactly what's changed. With Close Encounters you have a guide to help you along.

The main draw of the new box set besides the availability of the original version is the new retrospective - "30 Years of Close Encounters." It's basically an interview with Spielberg, where he discusses the film from inception to how it's survived over the years. It's a must-have for fans of Close Encounters. The making-of documentary has been available before and is somewhat annoyingly spread out over the three discs, but it's still worth your time. And the 1977 featurette shows you how much has changed (and how little) in this kind of behind-the-scenes material. The Blu-ray edition features all three variations on one-disc and allows fans to compare and branch from film to film and via a storyboard-to-scene comparison.

Will this be the final word on Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Probably not. The film's already been cut and recut and there will probably be another version that pops up for the 35th or 40th anniversary. I'd never even imply this about most studio double dips and I generally think it's an epidemic in the industry, but the truth is that when a film's as good as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it's okay to pay for it again every five years. It means something. It's important.