I wasn't planning to make a transmission tonight because I've already spent far too much time thinking about Disclosure Day and I was determined to focus on other matters. Unfortunately, the more I attempted to think about other matters, the more those matters appeared to lead directly back to Disclosure Day. This is becoming a pattern. I've got a Spielberg folder now. I don't know when that happened. At some point during the last forty-eight hours I apparently crossed a line where creating a Spielberg folder seemed like a perfectly reasonable use of my evening. Looking back, that's probably the sort of thing a person should notice about themselves.
The question that keeps bothering me is not whether the film is any good. I couldn't care less whether it's any good. The question is how Steven Spielberg somehow ended up becoming the public face of disclosure. For years we were told disclosure was coming. Researchers told us. Podcasters told us. Conference speakers told us. Entire industries sprang up around the idea that disclosure would be the defining event of modern history. Then the government start declassifying things, hearings start happening, military footage starts appearing and suddenly Steven Spielberg releases Disclosure Day. The UFO community goes strangely quiet and somehow we're all expected to accept that this is a perfectly normal sequence of events.
At some point somebody must have sat Steven Spielberg down and explained something to him. I don't know who. I don't know what was explained. I don't know whether Steven Spielberg even realised he was being briefed. Nevertheless, events suggest information transfer occurred.
The timing alone should concern people. If the film arrived ten years ago it would just be a film. If it arrived ten years from now it would just be a film. Instead it arrives now, right at the exact moment disclosure is drifting into public consciousness.
And then there's Elon Musk, who keeps turning up every time I try to think about something else. This is another problem. Every road seems to lead back to Elon Musk. The man's building rockets, building robots and talking about Mars simultaneously. Nobody seems troubled by this. Everybody talks about it as though that's a completely normal collection of hobbies. If your neighbour started building rockets, manufacturing humanoid robots and discussing the colonisation of another planet, people would have questions. Yet when billionaires do it we're supposed to nod thoughtfully and call them visionaries. Visionaries of what exactly? That's what I'd like to know.
I've spent part of this evening trying to work out whether Musk and Spielberg are connected. One man appears determined to get people off Earth while another appears determined to prepare people for disclosure. Perhaps these are unrelated developments. Perhaps they're not. Perhaps somebody knows something. Perhaps lots of people know something. What troubles me is that the people who spent forty years claiming they knew something have suddenly become remarkably difficult to locate.
I keep coming back to that. The silence. The silence is what bothers me. The UFO community should be treating Disclosure Day like the arrival of a comet. Instead Steven Spielberg seems more excited about disclosure than the disclosure people. That sentence should not exist and yet here we are. I've reached the point where I find myself wondering whether Disclosure Day is actually part of disclosure. Not a film about disclosure. Disclosure itself. I realise that's a strong claim. Fortunately I'm not making it. I'm merely saying I've been unable to stop thinking about it since approximately half past six this evening.
The generator has started humming again. The sort of humming that suggests either imminent failure or judgement. I'm not qualified to determine which.
If anybody receives this transmission, and frankly that's becoming harder to determine thanks to the continuing shadowbanning of the UFO community, I'd ask only that you pay attention. Not to the aliens. Not to the special effects. Pay attention to the timing. Pay attention to who's talking. Most importantly, pay attention to who's gone quiet. The people who spent decades preparing us for disclosure appear strangely absent, while Steven Spielberg and Elon Musk seem increasingly determined to occupy the conversation. Maybe that's nothing. Maybe it's everything.
I watched it yesterday. It wasn’t much of a disclosure for me at all. Anybody who’s gone down the UFO rabbit hole has known about this stuff for a long time.
Yes there were dramatic chase scenes but for me that’s mainly filling time for a quick adrenaline rush that dissipates soon enough.
The religious implications were pitiful. The questions that Eve’s character was asking I don’t think we’re meaningful for most people. Definitely not for me. It wasn’t developed enough nor was it satisfyingly resolved.
Yes, the score and the filming were well done as always, but the story just felt like a rerun with some words changed.
And the thing that prompted me to bother going to the theater to see that movie was seeing half of a Steven Spielberg documentary on HBO yesterday. Then I came home and watched the rest. So I guess it was a Spielberg day and, while I appreciate his artistry and longevity and his thrills, it just felt like candy.
I've seen this one bouncing off a lot of people; which is valid, it doesn't work for everyone and that script, admittedly, is a mess.
The religious questions, to me, were the most interesting part, but YMMV. I want to see it again to explore all the connections to the Adam and Eve story, the tower of Babel, etc. that Spielberg is weaving in (and that I didn't even consider in the moment, but Steven Greydanus' review mentions).
That said, I was wondering why this one is more mid-tier Spielberg (probably my all-time favorite filmmaker). And I think it's something I talk about in the review. So, SPOILERS to those reading: The reveal that both Kellner and Margaret have been chosen by the aliens as their ambassadors and that Kellner does it through math and Margaret through empathy is really interesting. I think it plays into the idea of needing both empaths and engineers, and it's in line with Spielberg's family history -- his father was a computer scientist, his mother an artist. The Fabelmans is a very thinly veiled autobiography of the dissolution of their marriage, and you can see Spielberg honoring with them in this film.
But he's done this before -- and better. The ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one of my all-time favorite movies, marries computers and music to communicate with another species. Someone brought this up to Spielberg a few years ago, that this was his attempt to reconcile his parents' separation; in the interview, Spielberg seems shocked. He never even thought about it. It was coming out in the art but not via text.
Disclosure Day lacks that poetry -- it's a clunkier version of that final moment (there's a lot of CE3K in this one). I think the movie is a lot of fun, it's thrilling and I like the ideas it grapples with. But I don't think you're wrong to say it's a rerun; it's Spielberg having the same conversations he's had before. I think they're fascinating conversations, but he's said it better before.
A lot of of those themes you just mentioned are in the Spielberg documentary on HBO and so I was already aware of that dynamic going into the movie and I could see that overlay, at least intuitively.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the movie… I think I did. I was just expecting more.
That Spielberg doc is really good (I think it came out right before West Side Story and I've seen it a few times).
Perry and I just recorded a podcast conversation about Disclosure Day and the funny thing is how much my baggage on the movie has shifted in the last week. I enjoy it and think it's a fun blockbuster, but some stuff has really nagged at me in the last week or so, and I think it's interesting how my review probably, in hindsight, comes off as more positive than I feel now but that I also worry the podcast conversation paints me as too negative!
You wrote "There’s no verse in Genesis – or anywhere in the Bible – that says humans are 'God’s supreme creation on earth.'" Not those exact words. But if you allow a paraphrase: Genesis 1:26–27 New International Version (NIV): “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”
I'm fairly certain that's what they meant was a paraphrase, but the way it was delivered by one character and then confirmed by another sounded like they were acknowledging actual phrasing (like I said, the script's a mess).
I wasn't planning to make a transmission tonight because I've already spent far too much time thinking about Disclosure Day and I was determined to focus on other matters. Unfortunately, the more I attempted to think about other matters, the more those matters appeared to lead directly back to Disclosure Day. This is becoming a pattern. I've got a Spielberg folder now. I don't know when that happened. At some point during the last forty-eight hours I apparently crossed a line where creating a Spielberg folder seemed like a perfectly reasonable use of my evening. Looking back, that's probably the sort of thing a person should notice about themselves.
The question that keeps bothering me is not whether the film is any good. I couldn't care less whether it's any good. The question is how Steven Spielberg somehow ended up becoming the public face of disclosure. For years we were told disclosure was coming. Researchers told us. Podcasters told us. Conference speakers told us. Entire industries sprang up around the idea that disclosure would be the defining event of modern history. Then the government start declassifying things, hearings start happening, military footage starts appearing and suddenly Steven Spielberg releases Disclosure Day. The UFO community goes strangely quiet and somehow we're all expected to accept that this is a perfectly normal sequence of events.
At some point somebody must have sat Steven Spielberg down and explained something to him. I don't know who. I don't know what was explained. I don't know whether Steven Spielberg even realised he was being briefed. Nevertheless, events suggest information transfer occurred.
The timing alone should concern people. If the film arrived ten years ago it would just be a film. If it arrived ten years from now it would just be a film. Instead it arrives now, right at the exact moment disclosure is drifting into public consciousness.
And then there's Elon Musk, who keeps turning up every time I try to think about something else. This is another problem. Every road seems to lead back to Elon Musk. The man's building rockets, building robots and talking about Mars simultaneously. Nobody seems troubled by this. Everybody talks about it as though that's a completely normal collection of hobbies. If your neighbour started building rockets, manufacturing humanoid robots and discussing the colonisation of another planet, people would have questions. Yet when billionaires do it we're supposed to nod thoughtfully and call them visionaries. Visionaries of what exactly? That's what I'd like to know.
I've spent part of this evening trying to work out whether Musk and Spielberg are connected. One man appears determined to get people off Earth while another appears determined to prepare people for disclosure. Perhaps these are unrelated developments. Perhaps they're not. Perhaps somebody knows something. Perhaps lots of people know something. What troubles me is that the people who spent forty years claiming they knew something have suddenly become remarkably difficult to locate.
I keep coming back to that. The silence. The silence is what bothers me. The UFO community should be treating Disclosure Day like the arrival of a comet. Instead Steven Spielberg seems more excited about disclosure than the disclosure people. That sentence should not exist and yet here we are. I've reached the point where I find myself wondering whether Disclosure Day is actually part of disclosure. Not a film about disclosure. Disclosure itself. I realise that's a strong claim. Fortunately I'm not making it. I'm merely saying I've been unable to stop thinking about it since approximately half past six this evening.
The generator has started humming again. The sort of humming that suggests either imminent failure or judgement. I'm not qualified to determine which.
If anybody receives this transmission, and frankly that's becoming harder to determine thanks to the continuing shadowbanning of the UFO community, I'd ask only that you pay attention. Not to the aliens. Not to the special effects. Pay attention to the timing. Pay attention to who's talking. Most importantly, pay attention to who's gone quiet. The people who spent decades preparing us for disclosure appear strangely absent, while Steven Spielberg and Elon Musk seem increasingly determined to occupy the conversation. Maybe that's nothing. Maybe it's everything.
This may be my last transmission.
I watched it yesterday. It wasn’t much of a disclosure for me at all. Anybody who’s gone down the UFO rabbit hole has known about this stuff for a long time.
Yes there were dramatic chase scenes but for me that’s mainly filling time for a quick adrenaline rush that dissipates soon enough.
The religious implications were pitiful. The questions that Eve’s character was asking I don’t think we’re meaningful for most people. Definitely not for me. It wasn’t developed enough nor was it satisfyingly resolved.
Yes, the score and the filming were well done as always, but the story just felt like a rerun with some words changed.
And the thing that prompted me to bother going to the theater to see that movie was seeing half of a Steven Spielberg documentary on HBO yesterday. Then I came home and watched the rest. So I guess it was a Spielberg day and, while I appreciate his artistry and longevity and his thrills, it just felt like candy.
I've seen this one bouncing off a lot of people; which is valid, it doesn't work for everyone and that script, admittedly, is a mess.
The religious questions, to me, were the most interesting part, but YMMV. I want to see it again to explore all the connections to the Adam and Eve story, the tower of Babel, etc. that Spielberg is weaving in (and that I didn't even consider in the moment, but Steven Greydanus' review mentions).
That said, I was wondering why this one is more mid-tier Spielberg (probably my all-time favorite filmmaker). And I think it's something I talk about in the review. So, SPOILERS to those reading: The reveal that both Kellner and Margaret have been chosen by the aliens as their ambassadors and that Kellner does it through math and Margaret through empathy is really interesting. I think it plays into the idea of needing both empaths and engineers, and it's in line with Spielberg's family history -- his father was a computer scientist, his mother an artist. The Fabelmans is a very thinly veiled autobiography of the dissolution of their marriage, and you can see Spielberg honoring with them in this film.
But he's done this before -- and better. The ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one of my all-time favorite movies, marries computers and music to communicate with another species. Someone brought this up to Spielberg a few years ago, that this was his attempt to reconcile his parents' separation; in the interview, Spielberg seems shocked. He never even thought about it. It was coming out in the art but not via text.
Disclosure Day lacks that poetry -- it's a clunkier version of that final moment (there's a lot of CE3K in this one). I think the movie is a lot of fun, it's thrilling and I like the ideas it grapples with. But I don't think you're wrong to say it's a rerun; it's Spielberg having the same conversations he's had before. I think they're fascinating conversations, but he's said it better before.
A lot of of those themes you just mentioned are in the Spielberg documentary on HBO and so I was already aware of that dynamic going into the movie and I could see that overlay, at least intuitively.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the movie… I think I did. I was just expecting more.
That Spielberg doc is really good (I think it came out right before West Side Story and I've seen it a few times).
Perry and I just recorded a podcast conversation about Disclosure Day and the funny thing is how much my baggage on the movie has shifted in the last week. I enjoy it and think it's a fun blockbuster, but some stuff has really nagged at me in the last week or so, and I think it's interesting how my review probably, in hindsight, comes off as more positive than I feel now but that I also worry the podcast conversation paints me as too negative!
You wrote "There’s no verse in Genesis – or anywhere in the Bible – that says humans are 'God’s supreme creation on earth.'" Not those exact words. But if you allow a paraphrase: Genesis 1:26–27 New International Version (NIV): “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”
I'm fairly certain that's what they meant was a paraphrase, but the way it was delivered by one character and then confirmed by another sounded like they were acknowledging actual phrasing (like I said, the script's a mess).
I liked the message, and critics of the movie rarely provide a better movie.