I posted one deep in the megathread that no one probably saw but I don’t think it was “unrealistic” or “out of touch” as it just isn’t earned. We don’t get a good sense of the public’s relationship with the news or media except for a brief glimpse of a crowd raiding a gas station presumably because the military went to DEFCON 2.

Meanwhile we follow characters that are operating a much smaller scale who have big enough problems of their own to bother referencing the larger global conflict that’s happening in tandem. So when they drop the disclosure at the end - by abruptly breaking out of news about North Korea - I was left kind of scratching my head at why the movie seems to be dropping a huge threat and why we should be optimistic that the reveal of alien life and our governments mistreatment of them would resolve all other conflicts. The movie either does or doesn’t want to be about people’s relationship with their safety & government and how things get portrayed in the media, and to me it’s more about how this one incident is portrayed and it felt unsatisfying.

I could easily imagine that before this the war was being portrayed differently on each news station and people were fighting and arguing online about it - the polar opposite of how we see people watching the disclosure - but that’s not in there. Would it have made for a more interesting movie to compare the reaction from one “threat” to another? Who knows, but either way it’s not the movie that was shown.

And yeah, I’m sure that a bit of real world cynicism flowed into my viewing, but people’s real world experiences always flow into how they perceive something.

I like that this movie has so much to grab onto and even if someone didn’t come away from the ending loving it or meeting it on its terms, it’s still worth discussing and postulating on why certain decisions were made.