Disclosure Day
Jun. 13th, 2026 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraDisclosure Day, 2026 Spielberg film. I'll just put everything behind the cut.
I was hoping this would be better than it was. A lot of plotholes and motivation problems (like, why are people doing what they're doing and not something else) which I might have been willing to ignore for a more compelling core story. This is a movie that wants to believe that if you could build the perfect set you could change someone's whole perspective on their life and if you could make the perfect broadcast every single person in the world would watch it raptly and this was all a little too close to "Film about the Transformative Power of Filmmaking" for me.
Close Encounters works because ultimately it's about the characters (and because the "musical contact" sequence at the end is so powerful). This movie isn't technically a sequel (except for a similar-but-not nod in the music, and a shot of Devils Tower in a montage), but it's obviously emotionally Spielberg coming back to that story, saying "and then what if everyone fucked up afterwards, what if we squandered the hopes and dreams of the 70s, what can redemption look like in the 2020s", but... it just all felt too arbitrary. A couple of pawns are successfully manipulated across the board, okay, whatever. The alien at the end felt so unconvincing. (Someone on Reddit came up with the brilliant rewrite that instead of being a Close Encounters sequel, we should never quite see the details of the footage, just people reacting to it, and then at the end the alien is E.T. and it's a surprise E.T. sequel. Can you imagine.)
I do like thinking about what this movie looks like from the perspective of some of the background characters, though. Like, the counter-conspiracy team meetings about what details they needed in reconstructing the house (which I guess the aliens were telling them to do, and how to do)? Like, someone had to decide, did the VHS tapes actually have to be the right tapes, could they just have the right labels, could they just be mock-up boxes with no tapes. Or maybe nobody argued about that if they were getting all their instructions from the alien and from Hugo who has Word of Alien powers. (Speaking of powers, I *really* wanted to know more about the guy who vanished and came back after touching the device, what was up with *that*.)
I was hoping this would be better than it was. A lot of plotholes and motivation problems (like, why are people doing what they're doing and not something else) which I might have been willing to ignore for a more compelling core story. This is a movie that wants to believe that if you could build the perfect set you could change someone's whole perspective on their life and if you could make the perfect broadcast every single person in the world would watch it raptly and this was all a little too close to "Film about the Transformative Power of Filmmaking" for me.
Close Encounters works because ultimately it's about the characters (and because the "musical contact" sequence at the end is so powerful). This movie isn't technically a sequel (except for a similar-but-not nod in the music, and a shot of Devils Tower in a montage), but it's obviously emotionally Spielberg coming back to that story, saying "and then what if everyone fucked up afterwards, what if we squandered the hopes and dreams of the 70s, what can redemption look like in the 2020s", but... it just all felt too arbitrary. A couple of pawns are successfully manipulated across the board, okay, whatever. The alien at the end felt so unconvincing. (Someone on Reddit came up with the brilliant rewrite that instead of being a Close Encounters sequel, we should never quite see the details of the footage, just people reacting to it, and then at the end the alien is E.T. and it's a surprise E.T. sequel. Can you imagine.)
I do like thinking about what this movie looks like from the perspective of some of the background characters, though. Like, the counter-conspiracy team meetings about what details they needed in reconstructing the house (which I guess the aliens were telling them to do, and how to do)? Like, someone had to decide, did the VHS tapes actually have to be the right tapes, could they just have the right labels, could they just be mock-up boxes with no tapes. Or maybe nobody argued about that if they were getting all their instructions from the alien and from Hugo who has Word of Alien powers. (Speaking of powers, I *really* wanted to know more about the guy who vanished and came back after touching the device, what was up with *that*.)
