As far as I can tell the title has nothing to do with anything.
Its another child with powers story, with all the memes you know and love, but its less like E.T. and Stranger Things, and more like Firestarter. In other words, there's not a lot of humor or nostalgia, and a lot more weirdness, creepiness, and violence. Being on the run for the duration seems to be a common denominator in this type of story.
It's a long slow movie, heavy with mood and atmosphere, punctuated with occasional extreme action. Kind of like a Coen movie (like No Country For Old Men).
Spoiler: the coolest thing about the movie is the way our dimension overlaps with another dimension, and you can suddenly see all their buildings and cities all around, as if they were always there, but just hidden. Even cooler, its not just our heroes who get to see this - everyone in the southeastern USA sees this, meaning that even after E.T. goes home, our world is changed forever.
Even better, that's all left to your imagination. There's not a lot of handholding or spoonfeeding in this movie, and after a steady diet of Hollywood tropes, its kind of refreshing. Is the hero (and the people he is going home to) a human or an alien? Is that the future or the present in that other dimension? Are we even asking the right questions, there are so many possibilities. And then the movie is over, and you get to take all these mysteries with you.
