ET The Extra Terrestrial is now Extra Terrific - in The 20th Anniversary edition. To mark the 20th birthday of a film he feared would have "only a very narrow, Disney low-end kid appeal", film-maker Steven Spielberg has re-woven his dream, enhancing the special effects and scrubbing up ET the alien, with computer-generated imaging taking over from the animatronic ET in several scenes.

ET now breathes impressively under water; the stirring John Williams soundtrack is "newly improved" and the age of political correction and increased sensitivity has seen the FBI agents, in pursuit of children on bikes, replace their guns with walkie-talkies.

Spielberg was never one to upset children; stimulation, excitement and fantasy were always his tools in the film-making box, and so this cleaned-up, re-mastered, director's re-cut version thankfully does not tamper with the essence of 1982 movie. ET does not phone home on a mobile.

By contrast with Francis Ford Coppola's Redux version of Apocalypse Now, which re-introduced discarded scenes and added another layer of madness, Spielberg's impact is more that of a car wash or a car wax. Only obsessive ET fans will dwell on the technical 'improvements'.

Everyone else, and there will be a new generation seeing it for the first time, can savour the emotional journey of two lost and isolated souls bonding together: Carlo Rambaldi's little rubber alien, left behind on earth, and a young loner (Henry Thomas), whose father is absent and whose mother is often pre-occupied.

The chase scenes, the Mary Poppins-cloning bike ride across the sky, the pastiches of sci-fi B-movies all remain a joy, and at the heart of the film is the Peter Pan factor: the impossibility of a child's innocence lasting for ever, as adult experiences and the childhood learning curve compress it.

To an adult eye, only the arrival of the government agents in their white boiler suits now looks naff. To a child, it is still spectacularly scary in a film full of wonderment and mystery.

One final observation: look out for the moment ET tells little six-year-old Drew Barrymore to "Be good", advice she ignored to the maximum in her riotous teenage years.

Updated: 08:56 Friday, March 29, 2002