commonplace book

[Mild spoilers ahead, but tbh, idk that any of this is anything you couldn't guess from the trailers]

I'm just stuck utterly failing to believe in the movie's big ~Disclosure Day~ climax because:

We're in the age of AI now. Absolutely no alleged alien footage is getting credulously believed right off the bat, no matter what some newscaster says.

What a touchingly out-of-touch faith in the the power of journalism and the reach of local journalists, lol.

Listen, am I jaded and dead inside or something? Is Spielberg living in the past re aliens? Because I didn't buy the way people got immediately emotional on seeing the alien footage. Maybe it's just that he used the classic Roswell little gray guys with the big black eyes as his aliens, and I simply cannot take those seriously anymore. I just think that short of actual, very obvious and visible alien ships showing up in, like, major cities, you're not going to get this kind of response.

I take the existence of other intelligent life in the universe as a given. The universe is very, very big, both in terms of time and space. Our existence as intelligent life may be unlikely, but not so much so as to be singular. I just don't think we're likely to ever meet any other intelligent life, because see prev re very very big universe. So, like, am I an outlier here? Is this something I'd have to be Christian and/or religious to understand or whatever? Because it would not rock my whole world view to get incontrovertible proof of intelligent life. Obviously it'd be exciting, but it wouldn't be crisis-inducing. It also wouldn't be especially crisis-inducing to find out there was a whole government conspiracy about it. Like, if such a thing had ever happened, that's a given, lol.

In general, I understand what Spielberg is going for here, it just all feels so...naive. And that is coming from someone who loves stories about the power of love and empathy! I guess my issue here is that the movie comes off as incredibly naive about the logistics, and I guess worldbuilding for lack of a better word, of its setup/premise. Spielberg should have set this movie in the 80s or 90s, it would've been more believable as a period piece.

In general, I just feel like we're 20+ years past the heyday of this particular brand of alien/first contact story. It feels really dated, and not in a fun and nostalgic way.

One really gets the sense that Spielberg is a True Believer re aliens, and that's why the movie doesn't, like, bother to provide sufficient stakes for why this big disclosure needs to happen now, in this way. Josh O'Connor's character gives a little speech about it, but it amounts to "people deserve to know!!!" And sure, I guess. But I feel like there was a missing scene or a dropped narrative thread about what's driving Colman Domingo's character to set this all in motion at this particular point in this particular way.

(I know what reason I'd find most interesting: that Domingo's character knows that humans at large need to get with the program ASAP because the wider galaxy is about to come knocking, for good or for ill.)

I will say, props to Spielberg for the open ending, and for the unanswered questions. There's stuff to chew on here, and the makings of a much more interesting story. I also really liked Margaret as a character.