MOTHERSHIP from the film ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977) written and directed by STEVEN SPIELBERG

The Mothership seen at the end of ‘Close Encounters’ is awe inspiring with its cathedral-like spires and city of lights dome. The inspiration was apparently an oil refinery for the top and Los Angeles at night for the underside.

The late 1970s brought a number of giant spaceships to the screen. Intricate designs and highly detailed models including The Cygnus (The Black Hole, the USS Enterprise (Star Trek The Motion Picture), the Nostromo (Alien), Battlestar Galactica (from the TV show) and the giant Star Destroyers in Star Wars. There were model kits of each of these – with varying degrees of success. And in some ways this is the one that was missing – probably because it would have been very difficult to get a decent representation of the detail involved and all of the spindly probes. That said, I can imagine a decent sized kit with some rudmenatry detail – akin to a 1/600th battleship kit of the day - would have been doable. We can but dream.

Like the Cygnus the ship is ‘made’ in the lighting so a plastic model kit would be inherently disadvantaged.  The mothership looked massive on screen. In reality the model was maybe 5 feet across with a lot of photographic effects work involved to get the appropriate lighting and sense of scale. .

Designed by STEVEN SPIELBERG

Visual Effects supervised by Douglas Trumbull

Link to video ‘What If #11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWE8MpiFYWY&t=442s