Close Encounters of the Haterz Gonna Hate Kind
Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Premise: A man steals proof of alien life and goes on the run in an attempt to disclose the material before an evil government operative stops him.
About: One of the more surprising things about this movie to me is that Steven Spielberg has a ‘story by’ credit on it. That means he came up with the idea. Spielberg hasn’t done that in decades! Everything he does now is IP or adapted from a book. So, that’s crazy. The movie did better than anticipated this weekend. It was projected to make 35 million. It instead brought in 43 million. Alien nerds unite! Spielberg brought in longtime collaborator David Koepp to write the script.
Writer: David Koepp (story by Spielberg)
Details: 2 hours 25 min
Some key questions pop into my head when I sit down for a Spielberg movie these days, the most common of which is, “Is Spielberg a good director anymore?” I mean when was the last truly good movie he made? Look at his output over the last 20 years…
The Fabelman’s
West Side Story
Ready Player One
The Post
BFG
Bridge of Spies
Lincoln
War Horse
The Adventures of Tintin
Indiana Jones: Crystal Skull
That is one giant blob of forgettable movies.
The next question I ask myself is, is David Koepp even a decent screenwriter? Not good. We all know he’s not good. Is he even decent? And it’s hard to make an argument for that as well!
Black Bag – couldn’t even make it through the first act
Presence – I’ve never even heard of it
Cold Storage – Apparently this is a movie?
Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny – barely watchable
Kimi – Literally just learning about this movie now by looking at IMDB
You Should Have Left – Huh???
The Mummy – The worst Tom Cruise movie of the past 30 years
Inferno
Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit
Premium Rush
The Little Engine That Could
Ghost Town
Indiana Jones: Crystal Skull
Zathura
Secret Window
That is an objectively terrible slate of movies. Which is why I went into Disclosure Day with the lowest of expectations. You’re talking about a director who hasn’t made a good movie in 20 years and a hacky writer who only works in Hollywood because Steven Spielberg likes him.
So, it’s probably going to surprise the hell out of you when you hear that I liked this movie.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s about this tech nerd, Daniel Kellner, who steals a bunch of proof of aliens from the terribly named secretive company, “Wardex,” with his former-nun girlfriend, Jane. Wardex, run by the evil Noah Scanlon, is determined to get those files back before Daniel does anything with them.
Meanwhile, we meet weather girl Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) who, right before she goes to work, sees a cardinal. And after she sees this cardinal, she all of a sudden can speak Russian, Korean, and many other languages. She can also read minds. But she can’t control any of this. It just happens to her. Then, when she goes on air that day, she unknowingly speaks an alien language, which makes her target # 2 for Wardex.
The next phase of the movie is following both Daniel (and his gf) and Margaret (and her husband) separately as they seem to be trying to come together, despite the fact that they’ve never met before. There are a LOT of car chases in these two plotlines. Wardex must have its own car-chase school. Because it participates in a lot of them.
We also have this guy named Hugo Wakefield, who keeps hopping on the phone with Daniel and Margaret, coaxing them towards the warehouse he’s in, where for reasons we’re not clear on yet, he’s building a house.
A big plot item in this story is a handheld alien device that seems to have all sorts of powers, many of which we learn along the way. Noah Scanlon has one of these devices, which allows him to infiltrate the bodies of other people. So, for example, he can take over the body of Daniel Kellner’s girlfriend and try to kill Daniel, which he does several times.
What we eventually learn is that Daniel and Margaret were both part of a profound alien abduction that they shared when they were children. During that time, they were given certain powers. And the recent events have merely opened up those dormant powers for use. So, now, they just have to get Daniel’s data to the local news station where Margaret works and tell the world the truth.
You’re probably looking at that summary thinking, “I don’t know Carson. That sounds pretty silly.”
Look, before I get into why I liked this movie, I am not going to turn a blind eye to all of its problems, of which there are a lot. I would go so far as to say I hated this movie initially. I’ll tell you why. There are certain writing “tells” that indicate a writer who’s winging it.
Using animals in that vague faux-profound way where they stare at humans and humans stare back at them and we’re all supposed to conclude that something incredibly important just happened? That’s usually a bad sign.
The reason it’s a bad sign is because writers often reach for those moments when they don’t fully understand their own story. They don’t quite know what they’re trying to say. They don’t quite know what the mythology means. They don’t quite know what the theme is. So instead of clarifying those things, they create a mysterious image and hope the audience does the heavy lifting for them.
You’ll see this all the time. A character is running from danger. He stumbles into an alley. Suddenly there’s a wolf standing there. The wolf stares at him. He stares at the wolf. Dramatic music plays. The scene ends. And the filmmaker is essentially saying, “You figure out what that means.”
The problem is that symbolism only works when the writer already knows what the symbol means. If you’re using symbolism to avoid figuring out your story, the audience can feel it. They’re not experiencing depth. They’re experiencing vagueness masquerading as depth.
There is a lot of that in this movie. So I knew we were in trouble early.
Another huge issue was the dongle that Noah Scanlon had that allowed him to possess people. It was a really dumb idea. Mythology never works when the rules become too expansive. It’s one thing to say that if you hold the alien dongle, you can see faraway places and what’s going on with them. If you set up that rule, we’ll probably buy it.
But then if you also said that the dongle can make you invisible, now you’re going to get some pushback from the audience. Some will still go along with it. But others are starting to check out. Cause those are two different things that don’t organically connect.
And then if you also said that the dongle allows you to possess remote people, you’re going to lose almost everyone in the audience. Because now you’ve added a third power to a single item. That’s when the audience starts to see the screenwriting. And that’s when you’re toast.
If they would’ve gotten rid of that alien dongle thing, I think this movie is at least 10 percentage points higher on Rotten Tomatoes.
But now let me tell you why I ended up liking this movie.
For starters, this is the first time in a while that I felt like I was watching something that was real and tangible and that someone put a camera in front of and filmed. People are taking cracks at Spielberg for this film feeling dated but I LOVE that about this film.
Every room I was in, I felt like it was a real room! If there was a chase, I felt like these were real cars racing down a real road. And it made a difference inside of me. I can’t even explain it without giving the opposing example. One reason why I detest Mandalorian and Grogu the more that I think about it is because I don’t think a single thing in that movie was real. It was all created in a computer. And that completely takes me out of the reality of the story.
Then you had Emily Blunt. This is probably Emily Blunt’s best performance ever. I don’t mean in an Oscar sense. I mean in how challenging of a performance it was. I mean, for starters, she’s speaking with an American accent the whole movie (she’s British). She speaks Korean flawlessly. She speaks Russian flawlessly. She comes up with an alien language.
And there are these crazy moments that only people who have worked on sets would understand how difficult they are, where she’s hitting like 20 marks on this giant set with five dozen people behind her and going through five different mini-scenes within that sequence. Her performance was so good in this film that even if you hated it, you can’t deny what she brought to the movie. I thought she was nails.
But there were two moments in the movie that transitioned me from “Not a fan of this flick” to “I now care what happens.” The first is the train set piece. The train set piece is the best set piece I’ve seen all year. It’s probably the best set piece I’ve seen in several years.
What happens is that Daniel and Margaret are in this car that stops because a train is shooting by. And then this bad guy from Wardex comes up behind them and rams their car, and starts pushing it closer and closer to this moving train. And finally, the front of the car gets caught on the moving train, and gets pulled along with it, with both Daniel and Margaret still inside.
The two then have to get out of this car and try to grab onto this ladder on the train that’s just out of reach, while the insanely bumpy ride of the train makes it impossible. Meanwhile, ANOTHER train is shooting towards their car on a parallel track while ALSO the bad guy is driving on a frontage road shooting at them.
It’s a harrowing scene but the reason I’m so giddy about it is that this is an age-old set piece setup. A car by a railroad crossing was probably first done 100 years ago. One of the things I give screenwriters immense credit for is taking an age-old setup and finding a fresh new way into it. And the fact that Spielberg and Koepp were able to find a new exciting scene out of this ancient setup is a reminder to all of us screenwriters that fresh ideas are out there for the taking if you push yourselves hard enough.
That sequence was number 1 getting me on board. The second was Hugo Wakefield’s monologue to Noah Scanlon about why people deserve to know the truth. Full disclosure (no pun intended), I’ve been personally hoping for disclosure for decades now. And Hugo’s speech seemed to be directed more at people like me than casual audience members. And he said exactly what I feel – which is that it’s not their right to decide what we citizens can or cannot handle. We deserve the truth and we’ll decide what we do with that truth.
From that point on, I kinda felt like I was in the real world (dating back to my point about how this was all filmed in real locations). And I wanted these people to succeed in sharing that information with everybody. So I was into that last news station sequence. I know some people have issues with them trying to get to the news and not just put it online. But you gotta understand, if it just went online, the government could’ve said it was nonsense. It needed to be an event. So I understand why they went to the news.
When I look back at this movie, I think that Spielberg went for it. We’ve got dual protagonist narratives. You’re trying to maneuver the story to bring those narratives together. We’re cutting to bad guys and also a third pseudo protagonist narrative (Hugo). The story is basically told in real-time. We’ve got animals connecting with humans and all-powerful alien devices and remote possession and invisibility set pieces.
People say Spielberg phoned this in. He did not phone this in. It was his movie idea, something he never does, so obviously he cares more about it than his average movie. And if the rumors are true, he had Koepp write 47 drafts. You may have thought the movie sucked but those are not the actions of someone phoning it in.
This is a very flawed movie. But it’s a movie I’m happy I saw. My love for aliens and disclosure likely played into me overlooking some things that others couldn’t. But I’m not going to apologize for that. I think it’s worth checking out if you in any way think the truth is out there.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Always “What if” your set pieces. I’ve seen maybe 700 scenes where a car is on the tracks with a train coming. So, if that’s the setup for your set piece, you’re probably doing it wrong. Instead, start asking “what if” questions. “What if the car is stopped BEFORE the tracks, the train comes, and then another car tries to push it into the moving train?” Notice how the scene immediately becomes more interesting. Do we even know what happens when a car is pushed into a moving train? No, we don’t. So that’s a great place to start a scene. Any time you’re placing your characters in situations where we know what’s going to happen, you’re likely boring the audience. “What if” your way into a better set piece instead.
