Ann K
Senior Member.
I'm getting an endless stream of "to continue, type these characters". Is YouTube getting all snotty about showing stuff, or have we been hacked?
Spielberg's "Disclosure Day" pre-release Speculation
- Thread starter Giddierone
- Start date
I'm getting an endless stream of "to continue, type these characters". Is YouTube getting all snotty about showing stuff, or have we been hacked?
JMartJr
Senior Member.
I'm not seeing that.
NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
I hope not. I just used the "share" button on YouTube. Plays fine from my post for me. Granted it's a slow build and it takes a few minutes for Watts to make his appearance. As an EDM track it's bass heavy which can get lost on a computer speaker, so make sure your subs are hooked up and cranking
.
Ann K
Senior Member.
All OK now. No, I've done nothing, but it appears that my browser had been compromised for a short period of time because it was fine on a different browser.
Scaramanga
Senior Member
It also seems to include a frame from the infamous Area 51 talking alien video, and a number of scenes that look like the selfies the Mars rovers have taken....and scenes from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
Scaramanga
Senior Member
The first thing that came to my mind after seeing the trailer was the film The Fourth Kind.
That film also uses a bird ( the owl ) as somehow representative of an alien in disguise. And it also has the 'possessed' humans emitting odd clicking sounds. Just as The Fourth Kind used the owl in the posters for the film, so Disclosure Day is using a bird ( a kind of woodpecker by the look of it ) in its own posters. And of course there's the classic 'lone house in the woods' theme beloved of struggling authors like Whitley Strieber...
Scaramanga
Senior Member
I suspect we'll get the same sort of plot twist we had in Close Encounters. I never quite figured how the aliens in that film go from scarily abducting people's kids in the middle of the night for no apparent reason.....to being our ambient space music loving space brothers. Judging by the trailer for Disclosure Day, we're in for more of the same. Lots of scary aliens who really just wanna have fun and chill out to psytrance.
I suspect we're seeing hints of things like AATIP, Skinwalker Ranch and Lou Elizondo's tall tales in here
It looks like there's a trifecta of tech billionaire (Colin Firth), mysterious government types, and a plucky rebel (Joshua O'Connor). The government's trying to understand what's going on while keeping things under wraps, while the billionaire wants more power and has a bunker full of people trying to identify what's going on while he experiments with remotely controlling people -- possibly with 'Zondo-inspired technology he got with the aid of a friendly Nevada senator. (Or maybe he just found a crystal skull fragment; Blunt's character is shown holding a glowy crystal at one point.)
It looks like there's a trifecta of tech billionaire (Colin Firth), mysterious government types, and a plucky rebel (Joshua O'Connor). The government's trying to understand what's going on while keeping things under wraps, while the billionaire wants more power and has a bunker full of people trying to identify what's going on while he experiments with remotely controlling people -- possibly with 'Zondo-inspired technology he got with the aid of a friendly Nevada senator. (Or maybe he just found a crystal skull fragment; Blunt's character is shown holding a glowy crystal at one point.)
- Just speculating:
- There's probably a montage including Tic Tac, GoFast, Gimbal and more in the opening credits to set the tone of "something going on," much like "Close Encounters" had Lacombe investigating all the returned planes and the ship in the desert. (I'm sure CE3 shows up on the screens because it so informed pop culture that it pretty much has to exist in the backstory of "Disclosure Day.")
- But it seems like something contemporary to the timeline of the film, maybe the billionaire's skully experiments, triggers Emily Blunt's meteorologist to start her weird clacking talk on live TV (though why the Kansas City studio has *that* many people working in it is unclear). (Guessing she's wearing that red dress because she's had this inexplicable fondness for cardinal red since she was a child.)
- This starts her flashbacks to getting lost in the woods as child and being escorted home to safety by the bright red bird and other wildland critters/alien entities, so she returns to her country home to flee public scrutiny and try to make sense of everything.
- The critters show up again to try to communicate something to her, maybe concerned the billionaire will use Zondovision to squash human free will/destiny or something.
- At home she's tracked down by fellow experiencer O'Connor, who somehow gained mental powers like the ability to create crop circles from his abduction (or government experiments), knows the truth behind everything and that the billionaire has Zondovision, so he wants to sneak in to his facility and Zondofy the truth to the world.
- Meanwhile the government has figured out that Blunt's clacking relates to the "something going on" and tries to round her up, hence the multiple cars chasing them.
- How she winds up in the hands of the billionaire from there isn't clear, unless he's sheltering her from the government.
Scaramanga
Senior Member
Nah. Its Spielberg making a reference to The Matrix. The dress the weather presenter is wearing is almost identical to the infamous 'red dress' scene from The Matrix. Could be a clue to what's in the film...
Scaramanga
Senior Member
Here's an interesting fact....
Dan Farah and Steven Spielberg co-produced the film Ready Player One...about a virtual reality world.
Dan Farah then went on to produce The Age Of Disclosure, which came out recently.
Spielberg goes on to produce Disclosure Day.
Coincidence ?
Dan Farah and Steven Spielberg co-produced the film Ready Player One...about a virtual reality world.
Dan Farah then went on to produce The Age Of Disclosure, which came out recently.
Spielberg goes on to produce Disclosure Day.
Coincidence ?
NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
Assuming this new film is about UFOs, it would mark the fifth film Spielberg has directed that have UFO/aliens as a central theme:
Firelight (1964)
Close Encounter of the 3rd Kind (1977)
ET The Extraterrestrial (1982)
War of the Worlds (2005)
One could also add in something like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crytal Skulls and various other films he was involved in. It's a piece of his repertoire, so maybe not so much a coincidence, as a prolific film maker and producer going back to a favorite theme.
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Scaramanga
Senior Member
You sort of missed the point. Of course Spielberg has produced lots of UFO films. But we've only just had Age Of Disclosure by Dan Farah, and now just 6 months later we'll have Disclosure Day. And this isn't by two producers who've never heard of each other.....they've worked together on past films. I doubt this is just a coincidence.
JJB
Active Member
Interesting, but probably just a coincidence. Working with the same producers on different projects happens a lot in Hollywood. A VR movie, a UFO documentary, and a film called Disclosure Day might just reflect their interests.
Maybe they just like UFOs and scifi. I know I do.
NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
Oh for sure. There is definitely some synergy going on here. Farah said he worked on Age of Disclosure for 3 years, prior to its release earlier this year and principal photography for Spielberg's Disclosure also happened earlier this year. So, it would appear the pre-production for Disclosure might coincide with the production of Age of Disclosure.
Now does that mean they were meeting at The Polo Lounge back in 2021 and planning this all out? Were they aware of what each other was doing and sorta timed it out for mutual hype or is it all just a happy coincidence? We may never know
.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
But that could be non-coincidental in several ways -- from "the recent surge in UFO interest following the leaked Navy videos inspiring both" through "Oooh, Steve is making another UFO movie, interest is high, this would be a great time to make a documentary" all the way out to some sort of conspiracy (benign or nefarious).
I'm not too surprised that, both films existing and being made at this point in time, the word "disclosure" winds up in both titles, or in both stories. "Disclosure," both the concept and that particular word for it, is permeating UFO stuff these days.
Farah was the one who acquired the rights to Ready Player One in 2010 (even before it was published, having previously met author Ernie Cline at SXSW years earlier and reviewed a draft) and shepherded the project as one of three producers, with Spielberg coming on to direct in 2015 and also get a producer credit.Interesting, but probably just a coincidence. Working with the same producers on different projects happens a lot in Hollywood. A VR movie, a UFO documentary, and a film called Disclosure Day might just reflect their interests.
Maybe they just like UFOs and scifi. I know I do.
Hollywood being Hollywood, it's hard to say just from the credit how closely they worked together; what "producer" means has varied over time and from project to project. Farah reportedly contributed ideas for the script, was on set quite a bit and hung out with author Cline and was certainly in red carpet photos with Spielberg. Farah also repeatedly said he grew up with and was inspired by Spielberg's movies, but there's really nothing out there indicating whether Farah and Spielberg had a close working relationship or any contact since the movie came out in 2018. (In one interview about the filming of Ready Player One, Spielberg called producer Kristie Macosko Krieger "my producer" and says she spent three years working on getting rights to some of the nostalgic intellectual property in the movie. Krieger is also Spielberg's fellow producer on Disclosure Day; she's on the leadership team of his production company. So from that I'm guessing that Krieger probably did more of the hands-on producer work that would have involved Farah.)
Farah and Cline are also partnering on some sort of "metaverse" project for the Ready Player One world.
Giddierone
Senior Member.
I'm going to start a customer support phone line just so I can use that as the "hold" music...
NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
Right? Plus it pre-conditions the customers while they wait. By the time they get to you, they know any solutions you offer "are just concepts....of words!"
Z.W. Wolf
Senior Member.
Speaking of Ready Player One... I contend that everything that made that movie awful may is likely to make this new one awful too.
Half baked "concepts" that go nowhere. Inconsistent tone. Spielberg Schmaltz. Random memberberrys/easter eggs. Confusion about who the target audience is. A scoop of something kind of good, two scoops of overbearing CGI, and three scoops of forced "wonder"... and hit frappe.
Most of all, and the part that really bumps me... The "high concept" that's hyped to be some kind of wonderous, mind-bending thing that will fuck your mind all over space and back again, and really isn't wonderous. You're just told it is.
The hype for this latest clunker is familiar stuff... A mass of obscure imagery that's supposed to be figured out, but turns out to be just random obscure stuff with nothing behind it. The message is - "Feel a sense of wonder! ... Or else!"
Half baked "concepts" that go nowhere. Inconsistent tone. Spielberg Schmaltz. Random memberberrys/easter eggs. Confusion about who the target audience is. A scoop of something kind of good, two scoops of overbearing CGI, and three scoops of forced "wonder"... and hit frappe.
Most of all, and the part that really bumps me... The "high concept" that's hyped to be some kind of wonderous, mind-bending thing that will fuck your mind all over space and back again, and really isn't wonderous. You're just told it is.
The hype for this latest clunker is familiar stuff... A mass of obscure imagery that's supposed to be figured out, but turns out to be just random obscure stuff with nothing behind it. The message is - "Feel a sense of wonder! ... Or else!"
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Montauk
Active Member
Love those guys. But, to be fair, as Mike and Jay say in the review (which I agree with), Ready seems like something Spielberg really didn't care that much about and just did that 1-2 days of shooting in the industrial city set and the tech company set and gave the rest to ILM and the other VFX companies that worked on it. Discourse Day at the very least looks like it has some effort put into it on his part (him coming up with a reportedly 50 page long treatment being one example). We'll have to wait til June to see if it clicks.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
Yup, he should stick to less fantastical movies, something more like /Epstein's List/.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
Now IF this were some low budget film, those shots from in the woods would be an ominous sign that we'd spend the movie wandering around in the woods between action scenes. (A bane of low budget films because you don't have to build sets or rent a building, and you can usually find some woods where you can shoot without a permit.)
But Steve has plenty of dough, so at least we are likely to be spared that...
I think the worst part of the movie was that solving the genius' puzzle was supposed to prove your worth and understanding, but despite that we still wind up having this giant virtual battle alongside the car chase in the real world, and in the end it all boils down to who the lawyers give the paperwork to.
As if Jurassic Park ended with the velociraptors being served a restraining order.
John J.
Senior Member.
You say that, but 50 years ago he used a giant robotic shark. Now he's giving us a CGI Woody flippin' Woodpecker.
That bird had better have some pretty astounding chirps up its feathered metaphorical sleeve.
Maybe in the manner of 70's kids' TV series, like Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skippy_the_Bush_Kangaroo):
CGI red cardinal: Tchk tchk tchk. Tchk tchk.External Quote:
Emily Blunt: What's that you say, little bird? Rebels have seized North Korean nuclear weapons, the world stands on the brink of Armageddon but luckily a benevolent alien species is going to help us? A deer is going to lead us to a house in the woods, and that will help? Thank you, little bird!
Giddierone
Senior Member.
So funny that you should write that just as I was posting this...
I am all for the return to animatronics in place of CGI.
Z.W. Wolf
Senior Member.
The lowdown is that for a long time there has been Spielberg A and Spielberg B.
Spielberg A is Auteur Spielberg. The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List, Lincoln...
Spielberg B is blockbuster Spielberg. Spielberg himself has commented on the fact that Jaws was an important part of the shift to "blockbuster syndrome." Which is ironic in that Jaws was a passion project that became wildly popular because it was good.
The dynamic shifted from it sells because it's good to it's good because it sells. Which happened in the music industry too.
Movies produced to this model are heavily expensive to produce, heavily expensive to promote and ergo high risk. Which leads to chasing trends and a movie which is an uncoordinated collection of tropes with a proven track record. Blockbusters have an unfortunate tendency to be assembled from a parts bin, rather than being created to a coordinated artistic vision. Pleasing the tin-eared money men in other words. Spielberg the man, despite his success, is not immune to market forces.
Our debate here revolves around the hope that this new movie will be a Spielberg A movie and the fear that it will be a Spielberg B movie.
Evidence for Spielberg A - Spielberg personally wrote a 50 page treatment.
Believe me, I always hope for Spielberg A. But when I saw that bit about a spectacular chase involving a folk hero and standard issue government villains (MIB) that ends in a spectacular crash... my heart sank. Because that one thing alone strongly signals Spielberg B.
Further evidence keeps coming in. The phony and expensive hype. The horrible CGI cottage in the woods thing which looks like, as has been noted, a Thomas Kinkade painting; signaling phony sentimentality. The forced "sense of wonder." The "disclosure" popular trend/free publicity thing.
I'm also wondering if the red dress and the cottage in the woods are easter eggs. Red dress, as has been noted, may be a Matrix easter egg. I'm wondering if the cottage in the woods with the woodland creatures is a Disney Snow White (1937!) easter egg. Ick. Easter eggs are appalling. Here's a challenge. How many easter eggs did you catch in Schindler's List?
Sorry to say, it looks bad for Spielberg A, folks.
Spielberg A is Auteur Spielberg. The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List, Lincoln...
Spielberg B is blockbuster Spielberg. Spielberg himself has commented on the fact that Jaws was an important part of the shift to "blockbuster syndrome." Which is ironic in that Jaws was a passion project that became wildly popular because it was good.
The dynamic shifted from it sells because it's good to it's good because it sells. Which happened in the music industry too.
Movies produced to this model are heavily expensive to produce, heavily expensive to promote and ergo high risk. Which leads to chasing trends and a movie which is an uncoordinated collection of tropes with a proven track record. Blockbusters have an unfortunate tendency to be assembled from a parts bin, rather than being created to a coordinated artistic vision. Pleasing the tin-eared money men in other words. Spielberg the man, despite his success, is not immune to market forces.
Our debate here revolves around the hope that this new movie will be a Spielberg A movie and the fear that it will be a Spielberg B movie.
Evidence for Spielberg A - Spielberg personally wrote a 50 page treatment.
Believe me, I always hope for Spielberg A. But when I saw that bit about a spectacular chase involving a folk hero and standard issue government villains (MIB) that ends in a spectacular crash... my heart sank. Because that one thing alone strongly signals Spielberg B.
Further evidence keeps coming in. The phony and expensive hype. The horrible CGI cottage in the woods thing which looks like, as has been noted, a Thomas Kinkade painting; signaling phony sentimentality. The forced "sense of wonder." The "disclosure" popular trend/free publicity thing.
I'm also wondering if the red dress and the cottage in the woods are easter eggs. Red dress, as has been noted, may be a Matrix easter egg. I'm wondering if the cottage in the woods with the woodland creatures is a Disney Snow White (1937!) easter egg. Ick. Easter eggs are appalling. Here's a challenge. How many easter eggs did you catch in Schindler's List?
Sorry to say, it looks bad for Spielberg A, folks.
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Ann K
Senior Member.
...and in politics...
Z.W. Wolf
Senior Member.
A another trend is aging Spielberg. For awhile Spielberg managed to make blockbusters that were good. Raiders for example. Making any movie is exhausting. Doing something like Raiders is maximum effort. I'm 69 myself. Folks, you get tired when you age. Maximum effort gets to be impossible. Spielberg is 79.
There's also such a thing as getting written out. Charles Schulz put in a maximum effort on Peanuts. It was magnificent in the late 50's and early 60's. He got written out by 1968. The act got old but he kept going until Peanuts became a sad fossil. Watterson and Larson hung up the gloves undefeated.
Compare The Odd Couple (1968) and The Odd Couple II (1998). Written by the same guy. The latter wasn't just bad, it was sad.
There's also such a thing as getting written out. Charles Schulz put in a maximum effort on Peanuts. It was magnificent in the late 50's and early 60's. He got written out by 1968. The act got old but he kept going until Peanuts became a sad fossil. Watterson and Larson hung up the gloves undefeated.
Compare The Odd Couple (1968) and The Odd Couple II (1998). Written by the same guy. The latter wasn't just bad, it was sad.
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Todd Feinman
Active Member
Really?! You seem to have a lot of life left in ya.
Todd Feinman
Active Member
Agreed. I can't even get through sci-fi alien movies anymore. Something fresh needs to be done. Plenty of good story lines one could come up with. Even some of the stories submitted to the Night Drive Paranormal YouTube channel would be more interesting. Someone needs to make a good indie film, with a story spanning decades, perhaps a diary entry from a dead great-great-grandmother describing an airship encounter, then her descendants, who have read the diary, have their own experiences. Could involve MIBs in 1897, continuing to monitor those witnesses in modern times. Something…
Ann K
Senior Member.
I didn't want to mention that. I am older than Spielberg and can verify that "you get tired" comment, but I have no real knowledge of his mental acuity at his current age. Nevertheless it sounds as if minimal effort has been put in by Spielberg compared to all the additional work by others, and if this turns out to be a dud, there will be plenty of people to share the blame.
The reviews for James Brooks' "Ella McCay" have been savage and questioning of the wisdom of having someone direct a feature film at 85, six years older than Spielberg.
Dave51c
Senior Member
That's a shame, but I understand what you are saying. You are right, the genre has become cooky-cutter stale and often the plot is just rehashed crash-bang villain vs hero nonsense with a sci-fi layer.
As for the Spielberg movie, I think the premise is really interesting and regardless of execution the marketing is brilliant! It is generating so much buzz and I really want to see it NOW!
I will guard my expectations though. Even if it is totally over hyped, I hope there is a some little nugget of originality there.
Slow Joe
Member
Nah. That just clever movie promotion, to make people talk about it. Nothing more. They got nothing. We would know already if they did.
Most likely the aliens in the movie will be some type of avian-like and that's why the pecker is in the promotion.
Probably evolved from dinosaurs or something they want to make sound as clever and original despite being used a gazillion times before.
Most likely the aliens in the movie will be some type of avian-like and that's why the pecker is in the promotion.
Probably evolved from dinosaurs or something they want to make sound as clever and original despite being used a gazillion times before.
Ann K
Senior Member.
Many extensive and expensive promotional displays have been produced for dud films before. Do you remember the months of hype for "Eyes Wide Shut", for example? I think that's inevitable, because the greater amount of hype there is, the more the movie has to live up to, and the greater the fans' disappointment if it fails in that respect.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
It just occurs to me to wonder (hope, maybe) that this might turn out to be something like a dream sequence or something that happens in Our Hero's mind -- and so visualized differently from reality. Maybe even some sort of AI world, so it looks uncanny. (How many fingers does the deer have?)
This is based on nothing other thanhop, and thinking "that might be cool" or at least cooler than just a Coca-Cola ad CGI looking scene in a movie.
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