Disclosure Day
Spielberg went and made all his nostalgia-fuelled imitators obsolete. It truly makes Stranger Things shittier than it already is. This is an apolitical Three Days of the Condor.
If the aliens wanted to find the most empathic vessel for their communication with the world, I agree that Emily Blunt would be on the shortlist. But ironically, Colman Domingo has the best lines during his intellectual fight with the antagonist.
The ending is the weakest part, and it’s not even about the aliens. It’s the big revelation being done on broadcast TV, and everyone watching live on their phones. That’s nostalgia for a world that did not exist, unless in Spielberg’s mind (and box office returns). Walter Cronkite’s world is dead now, and nothing will bring it back.
The antagonists aren’t aggressive enough, nor they have the full backing of government power. Thrillers just don’t cut it post Snowden, Reality wins. The antagonist to empathy is clearly nihilism, the bad guy should be Musk, a tech bro, or Gordon Gekko, the empathy powers wouldn’t work on him. But his minions would be enthralled, and he was unable to do anything.
I really like the themes and all, but the budget is too high, there are too many pointless characters. The main people should be a couple themselves, it would fit the themes even better, the ultra-charismatic girl should be the ex-nun that rizzed her way into the broadcast feeds..
It would even count as commentary on modernity, but Spielberg is a boomer that doesn’t use the internet, he is not even aware of the things he doesn’t know.
The other major annoyance is how Spielberg, a Jewish man keeps putting out films with Christian messages. I truly believe this is a pure cash grab thing, a way to make it “palatable for Middle America”, make it more mainstream.
But it’s such a Uncle Tom move. If he’s personally atheist, just make it about people and cut the religious imagery. If he’s religiously Jewish, that’s even worse!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.