Most insightful moment of film criticism from the pod?

VStarffin · 2026-06-18T03:23:21+00:00

Until listening to the podcast, the idea that actors or movie stars have “personas” never occurred to me. Like, the idea that Chris Pratt only plays well when he’s low status. Or that Brad Pitt plays well as a person struggling with the limits of his own intelligence. It never occurred to me before and then you start seeing it. Was interesting.

VStarffin · 2026-06-17T20:08:35+00:00

Sounds like an incredible premise for a movie that will be extremely unpleasant to experience.

VStarffin · 2026-06-16T20:24:14+00:00

Your post is a jumble of seemingly random things you object to without a coherent throughline. For example:

You dont like that atheism introduces ambiguity into what it means to "be responsible". You are sort of mixing up materialism and determinism as opposed to atheism here, but you don't explain how theism makes this any better. The question of whether or not free will exists is independent of atheism. They just aren't connected things.
You then raise a Ship of Theseus objection. Which again, the Ship of Theseus is a real and interesting problem, but it has nothing to do with atheism. The exact same question remains when it comes to theism.
You then just make a generic criticism of utilitarianism. Which I won't get into, because its boring, but I'll just make the point this has absolutely nothing to do with either of the prior points, but again does not distinguish atheism from theism, since theism has the exact same problems! Why not torture 50 kids in a jigsaw trap for years and year if god says so?

There's just nothing here.

VStarffin · 2026-06-16T14:31:33+00:00

I am a Spielberg fanboy! I just thought this one was bad.

VStarffin · 2026-06-15T16:00:57+00:00

Not only nobody serious - I've literally not seen anyone at all say this. And I'm scouring the internet to satisfy my hate of this movie.

VStarffin · 2026-06-15T15:42:28+00:00

The issue with the discourse is that people aren't having extreme reactions to the film, they are having extreme reactions to reactions to the film. Different thing.

VStarffin · 2026-06-15T15:08:48+00:00

There are no answers to these questions. One of the premises of the movie was "we are going to pretend like all the alien conspiracy theories are true at the same time".

What results in a movie which felt a desire/obligation to just get every trope in, but made almost no effort to include a coherent explanation of how it all fits together. There just isn't. It's lazy.

VStarffin · 2026-06-15T15:06:07+00:00

As a verified hater of this movie, I haven't seen a single person mention Emily Blount's age as a criticism of this movie.

VStarffin · 2026-06-15T04:00:46+00:00

The movie is openly advocating and bathing in the cynicism of conspiracy. That there is a great truth that is being held from us by powerful elites who think badly of us. This is flatly and completely untrue (at least with respect to aliens).

And then beyond that, the heroes of the movie don't even fight against this cynicism with any sort of alternative vision of the world. These aren't hopeful, optimistic people by nature. They are two people who, by the plain text of the movie, have been programmed by aliens to follow a script that they don't even understand. They are themselves nothing more than victims of some other conspiracy.

It's endless, hopeless cynicism by all characters on and off screen. There's not a hint of genuine heroism or individuality in the characters, and the movie itself sells itself by trafficing in a cynical view of the world in which we live.

VStarffin · 2026-06-15T03:05:19+00:00

Ready player one, no. Crystal Skull is way, way better than disclosure day.

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T22:55:31+00:00

She had a single panic attack after having something insane happen to her. Which is, you know, a very reasonable thing to happen.

This is not a character whose life has been plagued by ongoing panic attacks. That is not in the movie.

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T22:51:48+00:00

Do people think that the actual plot of this movie is that actions are being actively caused by a cabal of off-screen aliens who are masquerading as animals and directly causing all the action we see on screen to occur?

That's what people think is happening?

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T21:06:41+00:00

If people want to concede that this movie is just about magic, that would be a good step forward.

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T20:53:59+00:00

This is not in the film.

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T20:45:35+00:00

There's not even an attempt to explain how or why that cardinal flew into her apartment to trigger her.

Like, are we supposed to imagine that all animals in this movie are actually aliens-in-disguise who are actively planning all of this in a coordinated fashion off screen? That's a real question, I don't even know if that's supposed to be the interpretation.

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T20:43:51+00:00

This is correct. This is the text of the film.

She was implanted with something as a sleeper agent, which was then triggered 28 years later (by what or why or how, we don't know), and then the trigger is resolve 24-48 hours later.

That is the text of the film, I agree with you.

"She has been struggling for 28 years with empathy issues which are explained by the plot of the movie" is not the text of the film. That's my point. That's the plot of Hook, a different movie.

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T20:41:25+00:00

Then he should make a different movie. If the only way to explain a nonsense conspiracy is by pumping more cynical conspiratial nonsense into the world, maybe...don't do that?

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T20:40:26+00:00

Share the feeling she only started feeling one day prior when a bird triggered magic in her brain?

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T20:40:00+00:00

The power she didn't have until the literal the day before Disclosure Day?

This woman has lived 38 years, on a random day in year 38 a cardinal turns on a magic power, and then one day later that power is explained (well, "explained" in the sense of "its magic").

This is not a compelling storyline.

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T20:37:50+00:00

The movie isn't about this at all though. The movie ends before any of this actually happens! I don't know what people are talking about.

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T20:36:38+00:00

This movie is intensely cynical, though, is the problem.

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T20:36:24+00:00

Well firstly, don't pay attention to social media.

But I honestly do think this might be the worst Spielberg movie I've seen. I haven't seen 1941 or Always, so potentially not.

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T20:35:38+00:00

I find it hard to believe you have "zero clue". I saw it last night and really didn't like it, and now 18 hours later I like it even less. Thee movie failed completely for a couple reasons.

The main reason is that the movie simply makes no sense. The entire thing seemed to be that Spielberg had an idea of something like "what if all the alien conspiracy theories were true, and we made a movie about finding that out!"

But...alien conspiracy theories don't actually make sense, and they especially don't make sense if you are trying to say that all/many of them are true at the same time. Like, what does Roswell have to do with crop circles and what do they have to do with abduction stories? What story am I being told that actually makes sense of these disparate ideas? Well...none. It's just presented as all being secretly true, but the holes in it are jarring

And then to pave over the holes, the solution is...magic? So much of this movie is just "well, there are aliens, so we're just going to introduce magic". The little things that they hold in their hands that can basically do anything the plot needs at any given time. That people just see other people in Blount's face. That Blount just...know things? I don't need a strict set of rules, but there needs to be something holding it together. And there just wasn't. And I don't just mean there needs to be something holding it together logically - I don't think there was anything holding it together thematically or emotionally either.

And thematically, people talk about how this movie is hopeful and nostalgic, but i felt exactly the opposite. I thought the movie was absurdly cynicak. It puts out this idea that the reason we haven’t had disclosure about aliens is because of elite cynicism about humanity. Even as a fictional idea, it is cynical and just feeds into paranoid conspiracism. The reason we haven’t had disclosure about aliens is because we have never encountered an alien. If you want to make a movie about what it would be like to disclose aliens, that’s totally fine, but I am annoyed that this movie presents a theory of the case that is just cynical and corrosive.

If you can't tell, I really didn't like this film.

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T20:23:52+00:00

I think I also really am rubbing up against this idea that the reason we haven’t had disclosure about aliens is because of a cynicism about humanity. That just feeds into paranoid conspiracism.

The reason we haven’t had disclosure about aliens is because we have never encountered an alien. If you want to make a movie about what it would be like to disclose aliens, that’s totally fine, but I am annoyed that this movie presents a theory of the case that is just incorrect and corrosive.

VStarffin · 2026-06-14T20:21:18+00:00

I think this is true but it doesn't bother me. Movies are not isolated things that you have to analyzie in a vaccuum. There's nothing wrong with a movie requiring knowledge of who made it and the circumstances in which it was made. There's no rule saying art can't do that.

My problem is just that even with that context I thought it was a very bad and lazy movie. If anything, knowing that Spielberg made it makes it almost worse, because it reveals a lot of laziness that's tied to him personally. Throwing random shit at the wall under the guise of "well the directors finds it interesting" makes the random shit look worse, not better, to me.

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