Disclosure Day

starstruck3.0

Wouldn't you like to know, weather girl

-ˏˋ mak ˊˎ-3.0

emily blunt obviously gives the best performance here but why is the second best lowkey the news anchor at the very end

SweelFor1.0

If you've watched the trailer, let me warn you against the misleading expectations it set: this is not an aliens focused movie, in fact it is barely a science-fiction movie. It is first and foremost an outdated spy action-thriller, that happens to have bits of aliens lore in the background.This 2008 feeling action blockbuster at least reveals its true nature in the opening scene, where a main character is trapped by the Bad Guys Agency who must secure the Weird Plot Device from him, as the commander yells "Stop! Don't shoot! He's got the Weird Plot Device in his hands!" and other eye rolling action dialogue tropes from your least favorite Bond movie. We then get firewall breaches, data leaks, and usb key copy/paste scenes that make you wonder if you walked into the wrong theatre. It's crazy how quickly the movie shit itself, and made it clear that I fucked up by purchasing a Dolby seat for this long awaited "science-fiction" Spielberg release.The movie is artistically and aesthetically from another era, the Evil Headquarters is full of bad guys in black suits wearing black earpieces, with screen walls all around the room showing satellite maps and TV news feeds. It's impossible for me to take this seriously, the film is so dated and ridiculous, the real mystery is how they made this and thought it was an acceptable movie to release in 2026.I am barely capable of summarising the story, it's endless chase scenes of the good guys escaping the bad guys, with every third scene being an exposition dump to let you know how the plot is advancing. It is cinematically very poor, the story telling is entirely dialogue driven, there is no meaning created from one shot to another, visuals, audio, nothing. The movie pushes "tell don't show" to comical levels, as one scene has a character about to show a revelation on a computer, and warns the other character "this might be hard to watch". And then we barely get to see it happening on the computer screen, the camera pans away and I guess we have to trust that it is hard to watch because the character said so, not because it is indeed hard for us to watch. This is when I understood it would not get better.Most of the movie is action driven, and the action is just shit, I'm not gonna make efforts to be more sophisticated about it. The main character is some random IT guy who sneaks through 50 FBI agents in broad daylight to steal a car, and then there's a car chase scene where this whole commando of elite forces is completely helpless and can't ever reach his car two meters ahead of them. The chase ends when an FBI car flips and magically blocks the road for everyone behind them who can't keep chasing. This is scooby-doo shit, what the fuck are you doing how can this be the real movie?Another highlight "what the fuck am I watching" scene is when Blunt has to destroy her phone, so she throws it out of the car, and her husband has to run over it. In this agonizingly long scene, he goes back and forth missing the phone several times in slow motion, until Blunt gets out of the car to reposition it under the wheel, then he finally runs over it, and she stomps on it some more. Why is this in the movie, how do you see this in your timeline and not decide to cut it out?The action leading to the climax has the bad guys entering a building, with Alpha Team going for the encryption key and Bravo Team going for the backup generator (this is real dialogue). If you missed 24, then Spielberg got you covered with this one.The character's personal quest and journey might be okay if you can somehow overlook all the flaws, but personally I was so out of the movie that I could not bring myself to care about anything. I found every character impersonal and unlikable, I was completely disinvested from them. Some rapid fire notes of everything I made fun of watching it: Firth's entire cartoonishly evil character, the husband disappearing halfway through, the WW3 background being invisible and having no consequence of any kind, the near useless animal symbolism, O'Connor carrying twenty scifi parody looking usb sticks for text and video data, Blunt having a random panick attack solved by putting her hand on a piano's strings for some reason, the Polar Express scene full of CGI animal vomit, the henchman being immune to her powers somehow but he's so incompetent it doesn't matter, the magic wand that does everything the plot requires to save the protagonists, Firth giving up at the end, the way the movie keeps revealing already revealed elements...The audio-visual presentation is utterly unremarkable and boring, the fanciest things on screen are endless lens flares and God rays effects that serve no purpose. The soundtrack is the most generic John Williams music, if you mixed them all this is probably what it would sound like. The CGI is surpringly terrible, I almost laughed at some animals on screen that appear for 3 seconds, and somehow they couldn't manage to make them look believable. What the fuck is this joke of an ending of my God. So the big reveal, the Disclosure Day is just footage of little green men (the default History Channel alien design holy shit Spielberg what are you doing) on the news, and somehow the entire world population instantly believes what they are seeing? No one seems to think "this might be fake" or "I guess we've seen pranks before, maybe we need further evidence before taking this as the truth", nope everyone just accepts it so the movie can end faster. The AI test said it's not AI so it's okay. You can tell an 80yo made this because every young person instantly starts watching TV on their phone, all at the same time in stunned silence.And the climax is a reveal of what has already been revealed? Are you kidding me? This whole tension building scene of the alien getting out of the chair, WHO CARES??? We've already seen them, why the fuck does it matter and why is this the climax? There's no dialogue, nothing he just gets up and Emily Blunt goes to her seat and says "Listen-" and that's your fucking climax? The payoff is literally the scene that you've already imagined in your mind before stepping into the theatre just by reading the title. What a joke, I can't believe this is the real movie. Who fucking cares about your pointless cliffhanger that means nothing, doesn't do anything with the aliens, doesn't have a message or literally anything interesting about it. We don't know why they're here, why Earth, what's the plan, what's the point of anything?How do you read the premise and then decide that the movie should be 99% shitty The Transporter remake, and 1% disclosure day that only happens in the last frame? Absolutely baffling decision making.So the answer to everything is mathematics, but we're not gonna explain why or how, here's a page with scribbled equations and it'll have to do. Arrival released ten years ago and this is your high concept alien language scifi movie? Fuck off. You're outdated, irrelevant. The movie just released and it's already outclassed by everything else released in the past 30 years, including Signs for the reveal scenes.There's even a The Matrix scene when Domingo calls Blunt and says "I have been waiting to meet you for a very long time." "Who are you?" "A friend." with thunderous rain in the background. Hahaha what a fucking joke, how are you not embarassed to have made this.This is a total disaster of a movie, I am truly in disbelief at how bad it is and I am not getting over it. It is almost unimaginable that a 2h30min long Spielberg alien scifi movie could be this pointless, boring, and out of touch with modern cinema. My biggest disappointment of the year is now behind me at least, it was my most anticipated release.