Where to begin with Steven Spielberg

Arguably no filmmaker has ever had the popular touch like Steven Spielberg. Altogether, Spielberg’s movies have collected more money at the box office than those of any other director, while he, along with George Lucas, has been credited with – and blamed for – inventing the kind of four-quadrant blockbuster that continues to pack cinemas today.

However, more than 50 years since his career was launched by the success of the made-for-TV highway chase thriller Duel (1971), Spielberg has a great many films for a beginner to sift through – new cine-memoir The Fabelmans is his 34th feature – and not all of them make for popcorn viewing. In an era in which blockbusters dominate, Spielberg has increasingly opted to make movies for a mature audience: historical pieces, political thrillers, dramas about war and conflict. While Spielberg’s ease with actors, innate Capra-esque humanism and fluid, intuitive style means his work is rarely dry or enervating, his subject matter is no longer always as family-friendly as it was.

Having established set-pieces and spectacle as a speciality in his New Hollywood period, into the 80s and 90s Spielberg’s brand – as director, and also as producer on hits including Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and the Back to the Future trilogy (1985 to 1990) – became synonymous with effects-driven family entertainment. Spielberg’s first film of the 80s, however, was a blockbuster still with one foot in the radical 70s; it was co-conceived by George Lucas to, like Star Wars, be a technically spectacular piece of New Hollywood revisionism.

A harder-edged update of 1940s adventure serials, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) stars Harrison Ford as action man archaeologist Indiana Jones, whose race to beat Nazis to the Ark of the Covenant makes for a total blockbuster – precision-engineered action, expensive (and bloody) effects, one of many ‘quotable’ themes by longtime Spielberg composer John Williams – that’s also frequently unexpected.

While Spielberg’s two further Indiana Jones movies from the 80s – 1984’s Temple of Doom and 1989’s Last Crusade – have their pleasures, Raiders offers the most surprise in screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan’s subversion of action-adventure tropes. Kasdan also gives Spielberg, who’s often criticised for being too cute with his endings, a cynical, genre-flipping denouement that leaves the hero at the mercy of events out of his control.

At three different times in his career, Spielberg has been responsible for directing the new highest-grossing film in history; each of these three record-breakers offer premium entertainment as well as an introduction to some of the director’s main themes.

In Jaws (1975), a New England beach resort is stalked by a great white shark during holiday season, forcing three ordinary Spielbergian heroes to battle a merciless non-human foe as well as a profit-minded mayor – one of many untrustworthy and careless authority figures to be found in the director’s films. In E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), a suburban fairytale about a boy who adopts the alien he finds in his backyard, Spielberg channels feelings about his own parents’ divorce through one of his broken families. In Jurassic Park (1993), which integrates animatronics and pioneering computer-generated effects for a story of resurrected dinos run amok, you’ll find the director’s capacity for both wonder and horror, as well as his favourite science fiction theme of the danger of unchecked scientific progress.

Following the success of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) was the director’s first ‘one for me’, and his first to explore what would prove a career-long interest in UFOs. Following a disparate group as they attempt to decode a series of alien visitations, Close Encounters is one of Spielberg’s most purely cinematic works, a sci-fi procedural that culminates in a near-wordless symphony of music and special effects.

Where he found hope in the genre at the end of the 70s, when Spielberg returned to big budget sci-fi in the early 2000s for a pair of new dystopian classics, his view of the world had become more complicated. In propulsive neo-noir Minority Report (2002), set in a 2054 in which crime can be prevented before it happens, Tom Cruise is a ‘Precrime’ cop chased across an overpopulated Washington DC under constant surveillance. Set farther ahead, A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) – developed over 20 years by Stanley Kubrick, with his treatment adapted and directed by Spielberg after Kubrick’s death – takes an even bleaker view of the future. A retooled Pinocchio story in which a robot child (Haley Joel Osment) journeys through a terrifyingly unfamiliar 22nd century, the film is uniquely un-Spielbergian in its hopeless assessment of humanity.

Born to a veteran father a year after the Second World War ended, Spielberg has – in addition to producing TV epics (Band of Brothers, The Pacific) and creating a video game series (Medal of Honor) – directed several features sparked by his enduring interest in the war. Empire of the Sun (1987) is another coming-of-age story taken from the curious perspective of a child protagonist, albeit one set in a Japanese internment camp, from which Jamie (a 13-year-old Christian Bale) watches kamikaze pilots fly to their doom. Tougher viewing still are Schindler’s List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), the former a brutal, sobering picture of the Holocaust and the latter a visceral Normandy invasion story, notable for the documentary-flavoured verisimilitude of its combat scenes.

Beginning in the mid-80s with The Color Purple (1985), Spielberg has, in between blockbusters, become an accomplished director of smaller scale period dramas, often in a light genre package, with America as the primary theme. He’s explored the American Dream in 60s-set caper Catch Me if You Can (2002), about the strange success story of teenage con artist Frank Abagnale Jr; slavery and US political procedure in ostensible ‘great man’ biopic Lincoln (2012), really about the multitude of players involved in the passing of the 13th Amendment; the judicial system and the Red Scare in Cold War thriller Bridge of Spies (2015); the media and Nixon White House corruption in the 70s paranoid thriller-influenced The Post (2017); and systemic racism in virtuosic musical update West Side Story (2021), an adaptation of a classic made only richer by regular Spielberg writer Tony Kushner (Lincoln, The Fabelmans).

Kushner’s fruitful collaboration with Spielberg began with 2005’s Munich, the most despairing of the director’s films. Made in the early years of the war on terror, Munich begins as a men on a mission movie, with queasily tense scenes of Mossad agents assassinating those thought responsible for the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes, before morphing into a mournful study of an abyssal cycle of vengeance. Also released in 2005, the uncommonly grisly blockbuster War of the Worlds finds Spielberg in the same dark place, with scenes of cities and people reduced to dust by alien death rays recalling the horrors of 9/11.

The Adventures of Tintin (2011) is another anomaly for Spielberg, though a more pleasant one. One of the director’s experiments in motion capture filmmaking (also including The BFG (2016) and Ready Player One (2018)), and his only fully-animated film, Tintin gives photo-real definition to Hergé’s exaggerated ligne claire designs, for the feel of a living comic.

If the first Indiana Jones adventure is the place to start with Spielberg, the fourth is one to save for later. Spielberg had initially wanted to leave Indy riding off into the sunset with his natty Grail hunt movie Last Crusade, but was tempted back one more time for 2008 legacyquel Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so derided for its outlandish flights of CGI’d fancy that it coined a term for when a franchise starts to show its age: nuking the fridge.

There are several blockbusters in Spielberg’s back catalogue that are generally considered to be less-than-perfect, but many of those still deserve a look for some undeniable set-pieces: a series of inventively nasty kill scenes in Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World (1997), the closest Spielberg has come to making an outright horror since Jaws; a futile cavalry charge in episodic First World War epic War Horse (2011); and an eerie ‘playthrough’ of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel in Ready Player One, one of Spielberg’s more interesting later films in its suggestion that even he may lament an infantilised modern pop culture landscape that some have blamed the director in part for.