Disclosure Day [Media Notes 184]

Meh. I made it through. I wasn’t hard, except for the seat. I couple of years ago my local theater converted to those recliner seats. I wish they hadn’t. I can never find a position I find really comfortable, so I keep it moving around. I liked to old seats. They had plush cushions and just enough “give.”

Anyhow, back to the movie, Disclosure Day. By the time I decided to see it I knew it was about aliens. Not my favorite. But Spielberg’s done it before. I really liked Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra Terrestrial; War of the Worlds was OK. So I went. Spielberg.

It was a chase movie, with aliens swirling around in there. That much was obvious. But just who these peoples were and what these agencies were, not at all obvious. They’re just there, doing stuff. But then the two central characters, Daniel Kellner (Josh O. Conner) and Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) didn’t really know who they were or what had happened to them, much less why. And then there’s the Wardex Corporation, some kind of private security firm with deep government ties, they’re pulling all the strings. Except for the ones pulled by the extraterrestrials.

Spoilers ahead.

Anyhow, the world seems to be on the brink of another world war and the good guys and bad guys are messing with Kellner and Fairchild about the aliens while they’re running around wondering “Why me?” And fast cars and chases. There’s lots of talk about empathy and hand-held stick devices that control others and then near the end there’s a flashback when we see Kellner and Fairchild stretched out on tables. Apparently they’ve been abducted and these wand things are ringed around their heads and doing something glowy.

At that point I flashed on Forbidden Planet, from the previous century. There Dr. Morbius uses the Krell mind device to juice up his intelligence with, shall we say, mixed results. Here the results seem better. It’s kind of the inverse. Seventy years, from 1956 to 2026. At the same time I felt echoes of the current moment, where, instead of aliens, we have AIs.

And then there’s the alien, when we finally see it. We’d seen aliens in video tapes. They seem to be the standard “Greys,” short, spindly, with big heads and big eyes. This poor guy was very tall, very spindly, and with a super-large head. It’s a wonder it could stand up at all. But it did, getting up from a wheel chair – where’d they keep it, how, and why? It put one hand on Kellner and the other on Fairchild, and then the scene changes abruptly – but we’re very near the end. I kept thinking, “So very frail and fragile and somehow it caused all this fuss. Does not compute.”

All these loose ends. The whole thing, just handing in midair. It does not compute. 

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