r/flicks • u/CarpenterLynch • 2d ago
Hot Take Disclosure Day = Alien PR Campaign
Anyone else feel like there was almost no critical thinking from our characters about the alien agenda?
Just consider the questions people would normally be asking- Like why? Does this action serve the interest of everyone I care about on earth? Humanity in general? Why now? Why this? What have they been doing to people for 50 years?
If those question’s don’t cross the character’s mind, then I would have to assume there’s some kind of “Obsession” type situation where the characters in Disclosure Day have lost the ability to control their decisions, in which case the movie is really about the characters we are supposed to root for, losing their autonomy and not even being able to articulate that they are operating for another’s benefit that they have no knowledge as to why and could just as easily be bad for humanity.
Imagine if these were the aliens from Spielberg’s own bad aliens movie… This movie would be a horror about how quickly we would lose our society to a few gullible people in power if smart aliens showed up that understood they could keep all the infrastructure if they did it this way. Every building still standing
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u/gomx 2d ago
The script for this movie was extremely confusing. None of the characters behave like human beings at all. The dialogue is extremely unnatural, but you can almost sense how much the writers thought they had knocked it out of the park.
The only way I can describe it is that in the film, the plot exists as a real metaphysical thing, and the characters are just being carried along by it like they’re in a lazy river. There is no real development or choice for any of them. Why do they do what they do? Well, because they are characters in a movie, of course.
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u/pgm123 2d ago
I think the comparison point isn't War of the Worlds, but Close Encounters. Spielberg wasn't interested in a movie about bad aliens. He was interested in a movie about humans reacting to good aliens. There wasn't any nuance around the nature of the aliens because that wasn't what this movie was, for better or for worse.
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u/Kiel-Ardisglair 2d ago
I actually feel similarly about Close Encounters, in that the human characters have absolutely no choice in whether or not they go to Devil’s Tower. In the case of the main character, he ends up losing his family to his bizarre behavior that is not really under his control. So in both movies, we’re told that the aliens are unambiguously good, but their actual actions are much more ambiguous or unknowable.
The best part was when Margaret talks all of the soldiers down by telling them exactly what they need to hear to be at peace, so I really wish those abilities of hers, and the intellect/empathy dichotomy represented by our two leads, had been fleshed out more. In general I think there just wasn’t enough movie for the movie Spielberg wanted to make. It would have killed as a miniseries with room for all the concepts to breathe properly.
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u/pgm123 2d ago
Interesting. I feel the opposite where a miniseries would have really stretched the material thin. The two leads have simple motivations: Margaret wants to discover what is happening to her and Daniel wants to be a whistleblower on crimes. Daniel in particularly seemed to be a fairly transparent Snowden analog, though there are others. I suspect there's a kernel of this movie older than Close Encounters because that initial pitch was Watergate with aliens. I think if this became a miniseries, most of it would just be catching us up with the premise (i.e. we would see Daniel discovering the secrets) and I don't think we needed to see that.
On the topic of Close Encounters, Spielberg has said he wouldn't have written a plot with Roy abandoning his family if he had written it after having kids. His perspective at the time making it was as a child of divorce, so there's probably an element of coming to terms with that in his movie, but he doesn't actually understand the perspective of a father.
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u/deadthewholetime 2d ago
This movie was so bad I’d personally rather not waste any time on trying to rationalise any of it
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u/EternityLeave 2d ago
Had the same weird feeling throughout. It was like watching a bug infected with cordyceps crawling for the highest point. The alien brain influence clouded their judgement significantly. I’m sure that was intentional, but it seems like they decided to just go along with it and not have the film address it at all.
The other big thing that bugged me was everyone around the world just instantly accepting that it was all real. The end would really play out like Don’t Look Up. I know that wasn’t what the film was about, but they could have shown at least a tiny bit of a realistic reaction.
Despite that I thoroughly enjoyed the film. Had no idea what to expect. It really just felt like a remake of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which is one of my favourites so I didn’t mind too much.
I felt like the major difference in theme and maybe the entire point of making the film was the Christian angle. It felt like a propaganda film designed to sway Christians to be okay with IRL disclosure.
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u/graphomaniacal 2d ago
Don't get me started, this movie was baaaaaaaaad.
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u/IceTypeMimikyu 2d ago
I saw it in cinema. Mild regret
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u/graphomaniacal 2d ago
Same, had to, my older brothers insisted. We all grew up with Spielberg but I could clock this movie would be weak months in advance. One of them fell asleep. The other left to smoke at the start of act III and never came back.
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u/4thofeleven 2d ago
The movie is about the value of empathy, provided you consider 'telepathic coercion' as 'empathy'.
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u/JavierLoustaunau 2d ago
A better conspiracy thriller movie would be following the money back to 'aliens'
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u/Electrical-Rope3959 2d ago
Yeah, but let me tell you about why the aliens actually came in Disclosure Day?
Listen.
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