Jack Hudson

It turns out that Spielberg is washed. I must confess that I disliked almost everything about this film. The writing was awful and got worse as the film went on, with many lines and plot points making little sense to me. Each character seemed to be defined entirely by their place on a scale from insufferable to downright stupid. While some performances were passable (such as Josh O’Connor), most were rather bland. Emily Blunt, despite being the first-billed actor and appearing in the majority of the scenes in the film, commits to a single expression throughout the entirety of the film: a stare into the middle distance with eyes wide and mouth slightly agape, as though looking through the fourth wall at me in the movie theater, my head in my hands, trying to understand why this film is the way that it is.

While I have touched on quite a few details, the broader strokes of this film are little better. It seems to me that we witness by far the least interesting part of the story. Humanity’s first contact with alien life, the subsequent attempts of the government to hide it, and the takeover of the military by a random, small, private company are all entirely off-screen, as are the ramifications of releasing such information to the public, which is the central question in this film. Instead, we’re treated to two characters who spend the entire film driving away from and then back to Kansas City, both of whom possessing almost entirely unexplained superpowers which never especially matter in the plot regardless.

The writing of this film is, in my opinion, by far its weakest point. The audience is left largely in the dark for a large portion of the film, even regarding details known to the characters in the film. Worse, most of the questions I had weren’t answered at all. The writers seemed to concoct the film without ever stopping to question whether their premise makes sense or should be explained in any way. Why do the protagonists have superpowers? (The film reveals that it’s because they were abducted by aliens as children, but that just kicks the can down the road.) Why did aliens abduct these children? Why does Josh O’Connor’s character even have superhuman mathematical ability if it literally never comes up or matters in any way? Why does his superhuman mathematical ability give him the ability to understand human language? If Hugo knew that two children were abducted as children (which he seems to heavily imply multiple times in the film), then why does he only try to track down O’Connor’s character? Why did the aliens bother giving these two random children superpowers only to make them lay dormant until they came back again in the form of animals at two completely random points in their lives? These are just the questions I have about the plot itself, but I have just as many about the world surrounding the plot, which the writers seem to have done even less to interrogate. Why do the aliens keep only landing in America? Why have none of the many, many people involved in keeping aliens a secret since 1947 said or leaked anything? Surely Hugo wasn’t the first person involved to ever think of doing anything; most of the people involved are just random military people or cops!

All of these issues would, I think, be at least passable in a film with a strong premise. However, I won’t even grant Disclosure Day that. “The government is secretly hiding aliens from us” isn’t a remotely new or interesting idea, and combining it with “these two people have superpowers now” doesn’t make it fresh, it makes it convoluted. The religion subplot feels shoehorned, and the vague attempts the film makes to moralize come out of the blue and feel performative. This was a weak idea poorly executed.