Faith Fiction and Folklore Podcast

Review of Spielberg's "Disclosure Day." It Doesn't Challenge Faith

Try F Podcasters Season 2 Episode 121

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0:00 | 24:16

On this Episode Gary does a Review of Spielberg's "Disclosure Day." The media freaked out, claiming that the movie was going to cause people to doubt their faith. These claims were overblown. The movie doesn't challenge anyone's faith. It's just terrible. 

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SPEAKER_00

Okay, yeah, disclosure day. So I watched Disclosure Day. It was absolutely awful. One of the worst movies I've seen in a long time. Uh, which is saying a lot because I've been doing a review series on the Force Awakens. I've been getting ready for that from Mind Matters News. I forgot how bad that movie was. Um, no, this movie's terrible. And I thought, like, it's so bad, it made me seriously consider that the whole like this is uh predictive programming thing might be true. Because I could not fathom how anybody but a bureaucrat could put something like that out to the public and think it's worth seeing. Uh, but apparently, yes, that is the case. So, all right, I'm trying to I guess the best thing to do is to explain the plot. Uh so you know, I would say spoilers, but I I hope you listen and hear all the spoilers because I don't want you to watch the movie because it sucks. So, anyway, so disclosure day. It starts out with a guy in a boxing ring, and he's supposed to meet people at this boxing thing. They've kidnapped his girlfriend, and they're like, hey, you know, give us this doodad. And uh he's like, Alright, I'll give you the doodad or whatever. So they hold him at gunpoint or whatever, and then Colin Firth shows up and he's all evil. So yeah, Amy says, Spielberg was saying something like he figured it would make people doubt their faith. That's what I heard. Silly. Yeah, it's it's funnier when you realize how much the movie sucks. It's like, dude, if you're gonna sit here and be pretentious, can you at least make a good film first? That would be great. But uh, he did not. So uh yeah, that's the thing, is the guy, the guy's girlfriend, the person he's trying to save at the start of the film, that's she's a nun. So that's where all the religious stuff comes in. And it's very, very forced because you know, obviously they escape and he's got some device that scares Colin Hearn off, and then you know, the whole movie is like this chase sequence. And the very when he finally when the boyfriend finally gets her to some like you know, farmhouse, because there's always got to be like an abandoned farmhouse in these things, uh, he finally tells her about the the aliens, and her first thought, the first thing she says is, Well, this is gonna make people quit believing in God. It's like why? I don't know about anybody else, but I've always been like, you know, space is big. I don't know why in the world God would make space and then not put anything in it. That's just me. I don't know if the aliens can get here. I don't know if, you know, if they're maybe millions of miles apart. I have no clue. I don't really, I'm not super interested in the particulars, but just the idea that God would make all this stuff and then make it, you know, vacant didn't make any sense to me. And so I think a lot of Christians actually feel that way. So the idea that, oh, aliens are going to destroy our faith, it's like, why, dude? I think what they believe is I think what it is is that they um they think that we take this notion of human exceptionalism and they kind of equivocate it. I might be getting the term wrong. Um hang on a minute, but there's this uh doctrine, you know, that's like when they all believed that everything revolved around the earth. I think it was called geocentrism. Let me Google that, make sure that's right. I don't want to tell you wrong here. So let me geocentrism. Yeah, geocentrism definition, right? I know I'm right. So it's the two competing historical frameworks for describing the layout of the solar system. Yeah, the geocentric earth-centered that would be like uh solar system revolving around the earth. Heliocentric is the sun-centered model, which is what's right. So I think they're equivocating like belief in God with geocentrism. And they I think they're equivocating like human exceptionalism with like geocentrism, like the whole universe has to revolve around us, otherwise, there's no God. I think that's I think that's their mentality, which is dumb. I mean, nobody thinks that the universe literally has to revolve around us, otherwise, you know, we're not created or something. Like the idea of us being made in God's image uh is like, you know, God doesn't have a body. So how are we made in his image? Well, it's obviously we understand certain aspects of his nature, like he made us to comprehend love and beauty and things that are yeah, abstract, but objectively real, but are not physical. So anyway, but they seem to think that, you know, if we're not the center of the universe, then we're gonna like lose our faith or something. And they seem to believe, I guess the thing is they seem to believe that religion somehow implies that mankind is like got to be the best thing ever. And if somehow you can disprove that, then you can disprove God. Because maybe they think religion is like egocentric, perhaps. Or something, I don't know. Anyway, it's dumb. But she automatically assumes that uh everybody's gonna lose their faith, and you know, basically a nun later on goes, nah-uh. And that's kind of the end of the whole debate. But it was kind of the transition to that was just out of nowhere. It was like, hey, we gotta run from the government. Um, I'm gonna, I might die, and you might die, and we're we're on the run, and we really need to get this information out, otherwise the truth will never be learned. And then she just kind of randomly shoehorns the but people will quit believing in God, and they just got done dodging bullets. So it was just very forced. It was very forced. So anyway, after they have that conversation, the guy still decides he's gonna share the info, but he goes to walk in some field to get cell phone service because there's a guy building a house that's like a set for a house, and you don't know why he's building the house. And that's supposed to be some mystery box where we gotta care about. But uh anyway, uh while he's gone, Colin Firth grabs that device that helped the kid get away the first time. I guess there's three of them total, so Colin Firth has got one of these, and so he grabs it and he apparently it helps you jump into people's minds. This little doodad gives you psychic powers. So he jumps in the girl's mind and he figures out where they're at, and then he also kind of puts like a kill order in her head, or it's not even that's not even true. Basically, he stays in her head so he can act like a sleeper cell and kill the guy when he gets back. And the guy eventually gets back, and this was this was probably this might be the dumbest scene. There's a lot of dumb scenes in here, but as the guy's coming back, you know, this whole motorcade surrounds the farmhouse, and this dude, like he literally goes through the fence, and he literally just steals one of their cars, and the keys are in the cup holder. I mean, it's just so lazy. And so obviously he jumps in the car and then he runs to the farmhouse and grabs a girl, and it turns out it's Colin Firth, and he tries to stab him, and then she stabs herself to get rid of Colin Firth, and Hilarity ensues. But anyway, by the end, this this goes this go this back and forth goes on for you know two hours too long. And so by the end, they the I guess I need to key this up too. The girl on the poster is a reporter. And basically, she looks at a cardinal. That's another thing. That's another thing. All the CGI looks like 30, like it did 30 years ago. Like this is for something that's supposed to be preaching, oh, you're gonna lose your faith in God, and this is gonna change the world. For something that's supposed to be so groundbreaking, it really does have to, you would think they'd at least give it modern technology. It doesn't. I mean, it looks like chronic it's Chronicles and Arnia bad. It it's Chronicles and Arnia bad. Like, I mean, the animals are terrible. So anyway, the news reporter sees a cardinal, sees a CGI cardinal, and this CGI cardinal, for whatever reason, gives her psychic powers. I don't know why other birds didn't give her psychic powers, but this one gave her psychic powers. We never figure out why. And she's a weather girl, and so she goes to her job after getting the psychic powers and starts doing her best pentatonics impressions, kind of this thing. And apparently that's supposed to represent math. And uh yeah, so apparently they figure out the guy building the house figures out she's super smart, and she he contacts the guy in the field to go get her, but she's got psychic powers, so she's heading to them anyway. Yeah, anyway, they eventually meet up and they all go back to the news station at the end of the film, and uh she's got some stupid, like the guy downloads all this information showing that there's aliens and we're not alone and all the rest of it, and then she basically just sits there while this uh data this guy has plays, and then at the end of the film, for no apparent reason, and there's really very little indication that this is coming, at the end of the film, they they roll in this old, like half-paralytic gray, and you know, it gets up and it like almost kisses the guys, it's whispering to him, it's really weird and uncomfortable. And um, yeah, by the end of it, he they make a big thing about this alien and they build it up and they build it up and they build it up, and then the very last scene of the movie, the Weather Girl is like, now listen, cut to black, so you don't even get to know what the now listen was. We don't even get to know what disclosure day was all about, but at the same time, the movie was so bad. I literally threw my head on my wife's shoulder in the theater and went, Oh, thank gosh. Like I said it out loud, I didn't even care. It was so it was like a legitimate emotional response. I was so exhausted by the end of the film. I was I didn't even care what she had to say, I just wanted to go home. So uh yeah, that was disclosure. Absolutely terrible movie. So, anyway, other terrible things about it. They had uh this idea that the aliens would um because uh the reporter and the guy they'd been abducted of k as kids, because you know, of course they have. It's like there was a uh this is the other thing. I don't know why Stephen King made this movie, because he made a sci-fi special that's basically the same idea. Like there was a movie called Taken from or Sci-Fi series, television series like from years ago called Taken. It's the same concept, you know, you got the the special children that were abducted, you know. So it's basically the same plot, but anyway. Amy says, I don't regret not seeing it. It's a good choice, it's a good choice. You are missing nothing, absolutely nothing. Um yeah, anyway, but they just they have this stupid scene in there where the the way that they trick the kids is with animals, and they the animals lead them to Hansel and Gretel's The Witch's House. Which number one is weird. I don't know why they would make that connection, and I I felt like the movie was trying to say something, but I didn't it couldn't be good, and I didn't know what it was trying to say, but at the same time, they were so lazy they couldn't even make the house out of candy, like it was supposed to be Hansel and Gretel's, you know, the the witch's house, but it just looked like a house. And then of course it turned into the spaceship, because of course it did. Anyway, so as for the religious implications, I there really aren't any. Like it's it's basically it's everything that you would have seen 30 years ago. Like it's the same regurgitated crap. They acted like this was gonna be some big thing with challenge, like they were really gonna make like a full frontal assault on faith or something like that, which was the whole reason I even went and watched it because I was gonna I was curious how they were gonna try to tackle disproving God or whatever. And they didn't even do that in the end. It was basically just oh, can God exist with the aliens being real? And then one group says yes, and then or one person says yes, and the other person says no, and you've got your avatar for two positions, and then nobody ever takes a position, and that was it. So it wasn't even affirmative one way or the other. So it was a lot of hype, mostly by the media, I guess, to jive up controversy to get stupid idiots like me to go watch the stupid movie. Um, and I fell for it because I'm an idiot. But anyway, I will say this though, it it did give me immense pleasure, like immense pleasure to realize that a 20-year-old flip, like two 20-year-old YouTubers were able to sell out a theater, but Spielberg can't. It's like we were literally one theater show that we went to completely empty, nobody went at all. And it's one of the bigger towns in our area, and nobody was in the theater, and then in the other theater, there were like four, like, and we me and my wife were two of them. So it was me and my wife and one other couple, and that that was all that showed up. And I wasn't even there because I wanted to be, I was there because I was writing a review, so I was like, the old system's dead, Hollywood has to be dead at this point. Like, what else could that mean? Like, Steven Spielberg was like the cinema king for forever, and he can't draw in a crowd. And the other thing that was crazy about it was the significance of the newsroom. Like, they were going to disclose everything in a newsroom out of Kansas City. And I'm like, nobody would do that. Twitter is a thing, Twitter exists, Facebook exists. Like I don't know anybody who still watches the local news. Like, I'm sure some people do, but I don't know them. You know, so it's like Spielberg didn't even understand like the implications of technology in the last 30 years. This is like something that should have been made in 2008 or 2005. Um, not something that was going to describe disclosure in the modern world. So yeah, I mean it just seemed like a giant waste of time, and it shows that they're really Hollywood is out of date in terms of what it actually under, like in terms of what people actually believe about aliens. Like nobody's even at this point, the world is so crazy. I don't even think if we learned aliens existed, there'd be like that many people shocked. Um, it's just like uh well, it's one more, one more conspiracy theory to get proven, you know? Uh so there's that, and then it's this, it doesn't understand its technology, like you know, it doesn't understand like how social media affects the world and it affects the disbursement of information, if you will. And it still thinks it's relevant, it still thinks uh the news media is relevant. Somebody suggested that they were yeah, that they were basically trying to make the news media relevant again. Like it was like a prophecy sort of thing. I don't know if they buy that. I think Steven Spielberg's just old, and I don't think he realized how outdated like local news channels for the disbursement of information even are. I just don't think he knew. I don't think they're trying to normalize it again. I think I just don't think they realize how far behind they are. But that's just me. That could be bias. Um, there was something else, and I lost my train of thought. Anyway, so yeah, it's not a great movie. I think the other thing is religious implications aside, it really didn't have anything. It was very lackluster for all the media attention that statement got. But those implications aside, the other thing is it's one of those movies that is so married. And I think this was might have been at least adjacent to one of my points. It's it's another thing that's antiquated. These people do not understand that uh formulaic writing, the don't save the cat stuff, the dark midnight of the soul, the everyman, the author insert, that stuff doesn't work anymore. Like people are seeing through these carefully structured storylines. They want to hear like deeper questions. They recognize when you're forcing the dark midnight of the soul into a situation. And uh yeah, everything is like all these little blot plot plot points, they're just kind of sewed together as sloppily as possible. Like there's no narrative sense to it. It's just okay, we want everyman, bunch of random stuff happens. Now we want midnight of the soul, bunch of random stuff happens, and there's no, and then, and because of this, this happens. There's no connective tissue in the story, it's just random events rapid fired through jump cuts as fast as possible. And it makes for a really crappy story, and that just doesn't work anymore. Uh, Amy says they should let someone else have a turn at making movies. I completely agree. I completely these people do not understand how in the world to tell us, like they don't understand the younger generation, they barely remember how to tell a story, and that's why I brought up the YouTube section earlier, because I think the YouTubers are gonna end up breaking the door down. Because as much as I suspect YouTube doesn't want this to happen, I think it's a genie back in the bottle type of thing. And I think once people realize they can make once the theaters realize they can make money just by hiring local talent, and once the YouTubers realize that there are systems to actually get their movies out there if they actually make enough money to produce a movie, I mean, you no longer need the distribution model of Hollywood. And once people see that, they're not gonna want it back because those movies suck anyway, and they've sucked for about a decade. So I'm I'm thinking there's gonna be a whole other generation that gets to make movies. And I think your statement is much more profound than you know, or then maybe you realize, because I like when I went and saw backrooms, and I went and saw uh what was it, obsession, like those kids, like they they were like legitimate kids. I hadn't seen like kids in a theater in forever. And I mean, yeah, the movies weren't great, you know what I mean? Like they weren't like say, you know, they weren't like Schindler's List or Saving Prime's life. Like these weren't, these weren't high art. Like these were like mid-2000s level horror films. Not bad, but not particularly good movies. They were okay. They were okay. They held, they, they had a coherent enough story. But those kids were packed and they were so starved or even something that mediocre. And I think part of the reason is what you're pointing out. These people have been, these younger kids, they've been run out of the process. There's this old guard that's circling the wagons and not letting new blood into the system. And they're dying because they won't let new blood into the system. I don't think COVID has anything to do with it. I think these stories are getting more and more incoherent and more preachy because the community that's actually telling the stories is getting smaller and smaller, and the lack of theater attendance is people are just realizing this stuff isn't for me. But if the YouTubers break into the theater system, you know, Hollywood becomes irrelevant. And I'm kind of hoping that'll happen. I'm kind of hoping that'll happen. But as for the yeah, don't expect uh as for the disclosure day, yeah, don't expect it to shatter your faith. That that ain't gonna happen. It's uh it's a pretty uncompelling argument. So there it is. Um one more thing. I don't know if this is this is kind of funny, but you know, people are they were out there saying that this was gonna be some dad blame psyop, and I don't know if that was true or not, but one thing I thought was kind of funny is this um this picture came out. Uh actually as I was watching the movie, this this picture showed up on my Twitter feed, and it was just kind of funny. I don't really buy it because nobody's confirmed anything one way or the other, but um here. There we go. But yeah, uh, so apparently this picture's been circulating circulating around Twitter. Apparently, Trump was having some kind of meeting with the Nordics or the Argothans or some silly race. So I it's it's pretty good for AI if it's AI, but whatever it is, yeah. I just thought it was funny. So I saw this literally as I was watching disclosure, and it was for a for a brief moment, I was like, it's begun, they're doing another dump. But then everybody just started arguing about whether or not this one picture was real, so nothing came of it. So anyway, that was just a little humorous. I thought I'd show that picture. If you know where that picture came from, let me know. Because I I have no clue. I've been trying to get to the bottom of that picture as the day went on, and I was never able to do it. So if you know, please let me know. I'd appreciate it. So, all right, guys, thank you very much for sticking with us. I appreciate it. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Faith Fiction and Folklore. If you did, we would love it if you would subscribe to us on YouTube or follow us on Rumble. We can also be found on X, Instagram, and Facebook. And we are available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio. Thank you again very much for listening, and we'll see you next time.