Boring, hackneyed, soppy, oddly messianic and even when I first saw it when I was a kid and it first came out I felt it talked down to me. Really if it hadn’t had so much hype I might be able to like it, but it was one of my first major Hollywood disappointments. All the advertising had pushed it as the latest EPIC from the Mighty Spielberg and what I got when I got to the theater was a thin pablum kids’ movie that felt like a better produced version of the crap Disney had been cranking out for a decade. If it had been advertised as a kids’ movie I might have liked it, but I walked in expecting Close Encounters and got Apple Dumpling Alien.
It was from the point of view of a child so it had their emotional state as well. Historically it was a pretty risky venture...in 1981, films about children (pre-teens) were box office poison an had been for a long time.