Nothing short of the death of a cat could have forced me to watch ET again.

While I had dusted off many of the older Spielberg tapes in search of clues as to what I might expect from his upcoming War of the Worlds, I had always passed over ET.

Memory had painted ET into a remembrance of utter sentimentality - a film so full of saccharine I suffered a sharp rise in blood sugar merely contemplating its viewing.

My initial dislike of the film's cuteness made me somewhat unpopular with all but my most cynical friends. Most of those I knew who saw ET loved it, categorizing it as among Spielberg's best, a film that might take with them if stranded on an alien planet.

Always a science fiction fan, I made the valiant attempt when it came out in the early 1980s sincerely hoping I could do more than survive the sugar shock and actually enjoy the film. I was younger. I had just gone back to college and foolishly believed every film needed to have some significance of theme that I thought ET lacked. Indeed, I initially saw ET as nothing more than wholesale manipulation, a heart-tugging tale that in more earthly terms equaled: a boy loves his dog (and I don't mean the Harlan Ellison version either).

Back then, I preferred films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters, and -- slightly later - Batteries not included. Unlike ET, these films were easy to take, asking of me no more than to sit back and take in their flow of action. ET posed a risk. It asked me to invest emotions I was unwilling to invest.

Then, as I said, my cat died under circumstance that stirred up dusty memories of a film I had not seen in decades, and so acute were these images in my head, I reached far back into my film cabinet, drew out the relatively unused VHS tape, blew off the dust and - with nervous anticipation - inserted it into the VHS player.

Without going into the dull and tearful details that resulted - you can read about them in my account of my cat's dying - I can attest finally after all these years to the films legitimate value, how a person needs to be in a certain frame of mind to truly appreciate what ET is saying.

But for this exercise, ET provides valuable clues to an important piece of the War of the World puzzle, and what we might expect to see and feel when the film finally makes its way to our local theater on June 29. Strangely enough, War of the Worlds seems to be shaping up into a combination of ET and Jurassic Park - with the family situation and the home sequences drawn out of the first film, and the action sequences drawn out of the other.

This is a bit of an exaggeration, of course, since War of the Worlds will not have the deep sense of sentiment ET presented because the home scenes will not dominate as they did in ET.

In ET, a young alien gets left behind when his panicked parents take flight at the approach of heavy-footed, key-chain-toting adult humans bearing flashlights, guns and the idea to add a few alien head trophies to walls already loaded down with other innocent wild life such as young deer.

The child alien is befriended by a human child and his friends, all of whom are as distrustful of adult humans as the alien - and these children work to help the alien get back home.

The concept of what makes up "home" is a huge piece of the Spielberg mythology - a theme he explores again and again with each new film, and one from my tours of the sets shows that he is also exploring in the War of the Worlds -- and one that bears closer scrutiny in these essays - once I finish contemplating my naval.