And I did. And I regret it.
Steven Spielberg can make some great movies, but he also has this solid wad of gullibility in his brain that emerges whenever he makes a movie about aliens. It happened when he directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET the Extraterrestrial, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and it also leaked out a bit with A.I. Artificial Intelligence. They all made lots of money, though, so I fear there’s no way we can ever stop him.
Hey friends, I saw the new Spielberg movie Disclosure Day last night. The short summary, it’s mushbrain mystical bullshit through and through.
0:1313 It’s not as if I dismiss the idea of aliens altogether. As a biologist, I see it as almost certain that there’s
0:2121 life around other star systems. Life is chemistry and chemistry is universal.
0:2626 But I’m also aware of the existence of biological diversity. I’m confident that any aliens from outer space would not be
0:3333 spindly long-limmed pseudo monkeys with giant black eyes and gray bodies.
0:4040 That’s the only kind of alien Spielberg can imagine.
0:4444 I’m not a physicist, but I do believe that the cost and time of traveling from star to star would be so great that we’re not going to get fleets of clim
0:5353 flimsy tinfoil spaceships flying here to crash on Earth. What would be the point?
1:001 What would the aliens get at such uncountable expense?
1:051 Now, I’m going to sort of spoil the movie at this point. Sort of.
1:121 If you’ve seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the movie that Spielberg made in 1977, you’ve already seen Disclosure Day.
1:241 I don’t know how I can possibly spoil this movie because it’s already been done with not a speck of originality.
1:311 To remind you about Close Encounters, a few people see UFOs which somehow telepathically infect them with visions and obsessions.
1:421 The movie focuses on two of them, Roy and Jillian, who struggle to understand their visions and make their way to the
1:491 mysterious Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, where they find an international team of government people sitting up setting up
1:561 musical communications gear to talk to the aliens. The UFOs show up. Little alien people emerge. Roy and Jillian
2:042 join them. And they all fly off to their destiny in the stars.
2:102 That’s it.
2:132 Jesus. But I dislike that movie. Yes, I saw it when it came out in 1977. I’m that old and I did not like it at all.
2:232 Nothing is explained. How the aliens implant ideas in people’s heads. They just can. How the military got involved.
2:332 Why the government is trying to keep everything secret. what humans and aliens were trying to say to each other. It’s all in patterns and tones.
2:412 How anyone involved basically got tangled up in this unexplained mcguffin and what they learned.
2:492 The message was simple. Aliens are awesome, but your government is hiding them from you.
2:582 If you missed it 49 years ago, now it’s back.
3:023 Two people, Margaret and Daniel, have been implanted with strange images and the ability to speak Korean, Russian, mathematics, and other alien languages.
3:163 And they are compelled to rush off to exotic Kansas City, where their fate will be revealed.
3:233 Daniel is carrying a stash of secret recordings of aliens that prove aliens are real. They are pursued by Noah, the bad guy.
3:333 He’s an angry intelligence agent who is best desperate to stop them before they expose the truth to the world. There are
3:413 car chases and fights and faints before they finally join forces with Hugo and
3:483 his team. Those are the good guys who want to expose the truth to the world, which they do by building a replica of Margaret’s childhood home.
4:004 Don’t ask me why.
4:034 And then taking over a TV station and broadcasting stolen government videos of Roswell, aliens, crop circles, and sadistic examinations of aliens.
4:154 That’s it. That’s the end.
4:194 Most of the movie is about conflicts and conspiracies that seem to be living in Steven Spielberg’s head. And I suppose they make sense to him.
4:294 But he can’t convince an audience that they’re true. His aliens all have psychic powers. Why?
4:374 What evidence do we have for any of that? Why should we think that aliens can read minds?
4:434 They’re visiting Earth and ships with bright flashing lights. But the general public can’t seem to get a decent infocus image of them. But the
4:514 government has excellent video recordings of dead aliens and spaceship wreckage.
4:584 Why are the aliens here?
5:015 Why does the government, all governments want them kept secret?
5:075 Why is Hugo, no, not Hugo, what’s his name? Um, the bad guy, why is the bad guy such a villainous walking temper tantrum?
5:175 None of this makes any sense except this is the world of Spielberg conspiracy theory soaked brain. He presupposes that UFOs have to be real alien vessels.
5:295 Therefore, the only reason we don’t have good evidence for them is that the aliens have magic mind control powers
5:365 and the government is suppressing the truth.
5:405 They can’t let the public know about the aliens because they’ll panic and because the mind of God is a mystery.
5:495 Yeah, there is some bogus theological weebling in there. There’s Catholic nuns in a couple of scen.
5:585 Okay. Why? I I I don’t know about anything in this movie.
6:046 The ending is only going to be satisfactory to a UFO conspiracist.
6:096 A bunch of videos get released on television and the internet, and we get shots of people and on buses and in trains and living rooms staring fixedly
6:186 at their phones and TVs with expressions of awe. Oh, nope.
6:266 Only the true believers would be that obsessed. We’ve seen FX renderings of aliens before, and this movie is an
6:346 example of that. And people are no longer dazzled. and are going to see it as just yet another hoham show.
6:436 It wouldn’t have that dramatic an effect.
6:476 The movie also presupposes that there is a deeper truth to the facts that we have now. The Roswell wreckage wasn’t sheets
6:566 of myar and a bunch of sticks like a broken balloon. If we had the actual film camera recording, it would show an
7:037 amazing metal spaceship with the broken bodies of aliens all around.
7:117 But what if it is just my sticks?
7:147 Disclosing a better recording or a higher resolution image of that pathetic wreckage won’t impress anyone.
7:277 So watching this mis movie was a misery.
7:317 I kept checking my watch hoping it would end soon. The only reason that I didn’t walk out was I hated it so much. I
7:387 wanted to be able to say that I saw the whole thing.
7:437 Nobody is going to be able to tell me I missed the good part because I hung in there until the last line before rushing to the exit and there was no good part.
7:567 It’s a shame, too, because Spielberg really is an excellent, talented, professional director. Just don’t let him make these bad movies about aliens anymore.
8:078 There he becomes a crackpot with millions of dollars and a schmaltzy sentimentality.
8:148 Okay, that’s that’s all I have to say about it was terrible.
8:218 really. I also think Close Encounters of the Third Count was terrible. I don’t think ET was particular…
Thanks for saving me 2 hours and 25 minutes of my life I’d never get back!
I love your reviews!
This movie sounds like something written by Chris Carter during a bad hangover.
classic conspiracy theorist idea – that you can just get the proof to the people and everything changes. does it tho?
Sounds like V/H/S/Beyond was the better movie then. I’d rather watch that again.
Thanks PZ. I hope they return you soon.
@3 Bébé Mélange: If you can get real proof to the people then it would. The problem is always that the conspiracy people think testimony from some guy that says he was in a secret military program 20 years ago and he has no evidence at all, combined with a couple of blurry photos of something else, is evidence.
What to prove the military has deep underground bases? Sneak a drone in and track it while it drops 10 miles straight down the hole you claim is there. Think the world is flat? Long range drones are not expensive, track one’s movement over a flat earth. If your really paranoid record building and testing a long range laser range finder yourself. Believe in free energy from Tesla steam engines? Build one and record it working then hand it over to outside engineers to take apart.
I didn’t just dislike Close Encounters, I loathed it. I also hate-watched it until the end. It was boring, too: nothing actually happened.
To my memory, that was deliberately the last Spielberg movie I ever saw. I never have, to this day, seen ET. Thank you, PZ, now I will not have to break that streak.
Spielberg seems to be picking up the Star Wars franchise’s ploy of using old plots to try to freshen up these tired vehices enough that anyone would want to watch them.
I read this article after PZ’s piece, most amusing:
https://www.vox.com/culture/491587/disclosure-day-steven-spielberg-movie-aliens-ufo-files
Ars Technica: Review: Disclosure Day is big on action, light on ideas
Whoa!‽‽! The same thing happened to Taylor Swift!
What’s going on with the formatting?
But I do love the continuing saga of PZ being disappointed by movies. Especially considering you went to see another Spielberg alien movie after disliking Close Encounters and ET!
iiandyiiii, you see timestamps from the autotranscript; PZ did not massage it.
Here is what it looks like massaged* (I used a bot, of course):
↓
Hey friends, I saw the new Spielberg movie Disclosure Day last night. The short summary: it’s mushbrain mystical through and through.
It’s not as if I dismiss the idea of aliens altogether. As a biologist, I see it as almost certain that there’s life around other star systems. Life is chemistry and chemistry is universal.
But I’m also aware of the existence of biological diversity. I’m confident that any aliens from outer space would not be spindly long‑limbed pseudo‑monkeys with giant black eyes and gray bodies.
That’s the only kind of alien Spielberg can imagine.
I’m not a physicist, but I do believe that the cost and time of traveling from star to star would be so great that we’re not going to get fleets of flimsy tinfoil spaceships flying here to crash on Earth. What would be the point?
What would the aliens get at such uncountable expense?
Now, I’m going to sort of spoil the movie at this point. Sort of.
If you’ve seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the movie that Spielberg made in 1977, you’ve already seen Disclosure Day.
I don’t know how I can possibly spoil this movie because it’s already been done with not a speck of originality.
To remind you about Close Encounters: a few people see UFOs which somehow telepathically infect them with visions and obsessions.
The movie focuses on two of them, Roy and Jillian, who struggle to understand their visions and make their way to the mysterious Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, where they find an international team of government people setting up musical communications gear to talk to the aliens.
The UFOs show up. Little alien people emerge. Roy and Jillian join them. And they all fly off to their destiny in the stars.
That’s it.
—
* My query was: “massage this youtube autotranscrip text without altering it, just fix line breaks and paragraphs and remove timestamps:” — I do like the way it ignores typos and whatnot
… why is the bad guy such a villainous walking temper tantrum?
Described as such, this suggests a presidential parable. In context of the plot, an imitation Inspector Javert. A mashup of the two doesn’t quite gel: the Inspector has too much cunning, attention span, and work ethic.
Personally, I gave up on SS’s sf with War of the Worlds and Minority Report: he seems incapable of holding a plot and an imaginary world together for more than a few minutes.
i liked close encounters because i like the idea of magic in fiction, even if i’m a lil bitter there are so many jerks and lost souls chasing it in real life. i never really felt like the christianity and ufology in signs gelled, but the boomery mysticism of close encounters worked for me. plus i’d watch teri garr in anything.
jm – i really don’t think that’s true. i wish it was.
I guess it’s just not the same without the mashed potatoes.
Interesting read, and thanks for taking the bullet, PZ, but for future reference: I’m not going anyway. I’m not a fan of movies in general, and particularly anything out of Hollywood which grinds out formulaic pap with rarely any emotional or psychological depth. That’s the reason they do so many sequels. Hollywood even treated Dumpster as an actor putting him in films.
Bébé Mélange–
I believe JM was saying that scientifically-minded skeptics would be persuaded that some UFOs are alien if someone were to present solid evidence instead of the insinuations, non-sequiturs and sometimes downright tripe that is currently offered as “proof”. I don’t think he meant that good evidence always changes people’s minds.
I also saw Disclosure Day yesterday, and I thought it was terrible too. My simple review given right after the movie to my friends was “Well that was a hot mess!” And I also agree with PZ it was just a Close Encounters rehash. Spielberg should just be put out to pasture now.
I was hopeful from the earlier trailers, but the final one put me over the edge. Grey, bug-eyed, big head, typical “alien” was a no-go for me. At least Rocky in Project Hail Mary was a pentapod who breathed ammonia. A sad, lazy movie.
But they’re canonical, Doc!
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_alien#Barney_and_Betty_Hill_abduction
Wasn’t on my too-see list anyway.
Sorry, “to-see.”
Therefore, the only reason we don’t have good evidence for them is that the aliens have magic mind control powers…and the government is suppressing the truth. They can’t let the public know about the aliens because they’ll panic and because the mind of God is a mystery…
Maybe the aliens are using their magic mind-control powers to make all our governments suppress the truth? If the aliens had any sense, they’d know that if we really became convinced of their existence and presence on/near Earth, then a) we would indeed panic and freak out in unpredictable and dangerous ways, and b) we’d start figuring out how their interstellar drive — and their weapons — work. Better to use The Force on a planetary scale to keep us convinced that these are not the aliens we’re looking for.
(Of course, it would be even less trouble for them to just stay away from Earth altogether, and maybe leave small stealth probes monitoring our EM signals from a very high orbit.)
“And the movie also takes the position of the church. What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have?…”
Let me answer that question with another: Does anyone think the same people who routinely incite hate against Blacks, Jews, atheists, Pagans, gays, trans people, etc., would be any more kind or accepting of a whole ‘nother species (who, as PZ said, most surely won’t look like anything we’ve seen before)?
Iirc, Jillian stays behind because I guess she doesn’t want her son raised by aliens? Or he wasn’t invited because they didn’t want to babysit anymore since he tore the place up while he was abducted and they’d had enough of him? Whatever, she watched Roy board from the cover of some handy rocks nearby.
.
I enjoyed CE when it came out. I still mostly do. It was just stupid fun. I kind of gravitate to stories where people have weird reasons for doing whatever they’re doing, but either can’t explain why, or no one believes them or understands when they do try to explain. Hmmm…
.
Also, back then I really liked Richard Dreyfuss, who I’d first noticed waaay back when he had a guest role in Gidget as “Durf the Drag”–>”Durf the Surf.” I thought even then he was going to be a star someday. While that prediction came true, I did not predict he’d turn into a major asshole in his older age. Maybe the cocaine finally fried his brain. Kinda takes some of the pleasure out of CE and Jaws.
Aliens?
Three words: Von Neumann probes.
Self-replicating robots spreading at a quite small percentage of the speed of light.
Not flashy enough for Spielberg et al, so they never feature in films.
Terry Talks Movies:
“Disclosure Day: Spielberg’s Vanity Project”
A 90s film in 2026 drag.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=W5-W52aLwjs
Raging Bee @ 22
“Of course, it would be even less trouble for them to just stay away from Earth altogether, and maybe leave small stealth probes monitoring our EM signals from a very high orbit.”
Also, nanotech.
Also, stealth.
Thanks to The Guardian I found a better, non-realistic film for the summer.
Wait. ‘Everyone is an amoral maniac dedicated to acting out on their worst behavior.’ So, a documentary?
.
“A movie for everyone, not just Drag Race fans”: stars of drag comedy Stop! That! Train! on making the summer’s funniest film. .https://share.google/wY4Q00aB1C9D3JbGK
‘Stop! That! Train! is set in a parallel America where railways are the dominant mode of transportation, “stormaganzas” are recognized (if infrequent) extreme weather events, and seemingly everyone is an amoral maniac dedicated to acting out on their worst behavior.’
Mostly harmless.
1) If you don’t care about the “possibility” of aliens visting the earth, then UFO movies become only brain-dead Hollywood enertainment, like most other movies.
2)The only good book I ever read about UFOs was UFOs Explained by Philip Klass. He really investigated several “classic” UFO cases. I mean really investigated, if there was a radar involved, he read training manuals, etc. By the time he was done there was nothing mysterious left. UFOs were all hype and hoopla.
3)As for remaking the exact same movie, consider Prometheus, by Ridley Scott. It was supposed to be new but actually was just like Alien, etc.
@19 John M
From the perspective of The Grey’s, “Paul” was the best movie ever! Not only did Paul fix Kristin Wiig’s eye and cure her religious delusion, but he also wore pants.
I hadn’t heard of this film at all until I started seeing reviews pop up for it. Absolutely nothing about it looks interesting.
Close Encounters was very zeitgeist boomer. This film sounds from PZs descriptions very Gen Z. Therefore a remake is perfectly, capitalistically and artistically, sensible.
When I watched Close Encounters my friends were all enjoying their previous viewings so much that they didn’t tell me what it was about. The insisted I must see it with them (again, for them they liked it that much).
I though it was a horror flick about a guy going absolutely psychotically bananas and he sucks another unstable victim into his destructive potato-based delusions. He finally goes into la-la-land beyond any help from government institutions (that’s why the government ‘was there’) and stays permanently inside his head.
I castigated my friends, because they knew I didn’t like horror movies. They found the movie fun and escapist and delightful and didn’t get why and the more I explained how this (pretty obviously) matched the delusions of someone schizophrenic having increasingly severe reality breaks, the more freaked out they got.
As for remaking the exact same movie, consider Prometheus, by Ridley Scott. It was supposed to be new but actually was just like Alien, etc.
Yeah, I saw the first two “Alien” movies and it seemed pretty obvious any more sequels would just be more of the same. And they killed Newt (and Hicks?) leading up to the third movie, so fuck ’em.
I feel the same about the “Terminator” movies: the first two gave us the full story-arc, from beginning to a satisfactory end. Why restart something that ended?
Raging Bee @34:
Agreed, and yeah, Hicks. There should be a special place in hell for whoever signed off on the script. Apart from the sadistic gut-punch, it was also fucking stupid. Alien queen gets on ship, then gets kicked off ship. No need to check whether she brought any eggs with her, right?
I mean the script for Alien 3. The queen gets spaced at the end of Aliens, but the implication in the following movie is that the eggs were somehow undetected.
Doc Bill @31, I too think it was a darn good movie.
I saw Close Encounters back in 1977, and I was also disappointed because it was so pointless.
My favorite movie about the government covering up crashed aliens is Repo Man. Repo Man still holds up.
As ‘Disclosure Day’ Premieres, Steven Spielberg Says He Believes Aliens Really Have Visited Earth
Wocka wocka
Reginald, either that or he’s just spruiking the movie.
(Would that surprise you very much?)
There are no aliens in AI and this isn’t a matter of opinion. The beings at the end are robots descendants of the tech throughout the film.
You weaken your argument with the misinterpreting.