Got the blu ray intending to have some nostalgia from my childhood.... everybody loves the big lightboard communicating with the aliens, right?
Watching this movie as an adult, I noticed something:
Richard Dreyfuss plays a blue collar joe with a wife and a few kids, one of which seems to be a troubled son with behavioral issues. His wife doesn't appear to have a job, so he is the sole provider.
He starts feeling compelled to Devil's Tower, but doesn't know what is going on, at first. It turns into the compulsion manifesting first with the tower of mashed potatoes, culminating with the large sculpture in his living room. Along the way his wife becomes scared of his OCD and leaves with the kids to her mother's, but not until a very disturbing scene when his oldest son has a meltdown and really flips out on him.
But then without missing a beat he hauls ass to Wyoming, and to our knowledge he never considers his family once as he overcomes great adversity to get to the Tower, and then, is invited onto the alien's ship.
Along the way we learn that many were called, but he was the only one who made it. We also learned that those who were taken before by the aliens were going to be gone at least 50 years, due to relativistic effects.
But he just smiles and abandons his family with not even so much as a "fuck off." We didn't even see him telling the scientists, "Please make sure these people are taken care of."
So, great, feel-good movie about a man abandoning his family to homelessness and poverty to go see the neat spaceship.