Spielberg At It Again

TheVat said:
Mel's son is saved from the alien's gas by his asthmatic airways being constricted, which Mel attributes to God. So his faith is renewed and he returns to the priesthood
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Yes, Jesus wanted his wife to be horrifically sandwiched between a truck and a tree, practically cutting her in half, just so she could save the family from a future alien invasion by giving cryptic instructions to her priest husband (or so he thought at the time. Clever Jesus!)

Plenty of other people Jesus could have saved obviously but fuck them, they weren't main characters.
 
TheVat said:
Mel's son is saved from the alien's gas by his asthmatic airways being constricted, which Mel attributes to God. So his faith is renewed and he returns to the priesthood.

Also kinda dumb was "water is a poison to them." I mean, tech advanced aliens wouldn't cross light years of space to mount a large scale invasion and occupation of a water planet if water was poison to them. They'd search for their own version of "earth-like" and go there.
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You've changed your avatar, who is this one? Also who was the last?
 
Pinball1970 said:
Yes, Jesus wanted his wife to be horrifically sandwiched between a truck and a tree, practically cutting her in half, just so she could save the family from a future alien invasion by giving cryptic instructions to her priest husband (or so he thought at the time. Clever Jesus!)

Plenty of other people Jesus could have saved obviously but fuck them, they weren't main characters.
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Hahaha!

Other dumbness in the whole "Swing away, Merrill!" instruction is that it's not the minor league baseball son swinging his bat at the alien, but the glasses of water all around the house which really save the day. Why didn't Jesus have the mother's dying brain come up with "Pour water on it, Merrill!" Or "Keep a SuperSoaker handy, Merrill!" Or just send out an all points bulletin to lots of brains: The aliens are coming and they can't handle water! The Lord works in mysterious ways...

ETA: HG Wells (formerly HL Mencken). Wells seemed better suited to the forum.
 
Honestly, I thought people learned their lesson about Spielberg, if not with Amistad, then at least with Transformers.

Except, I suppose that presumes way too much of the audience. I should not be so arrogant as to presume them competent.
 
Pinball1970 said:
Yeah.

Alien1. Let's invade a planet!

Alien2. Ok where?

Alien1. That one.

Alien2. Its covered in water dude? About 70%.

Alien1. It's fine we can do crop circles 'n shit.

Alien2. Cool!
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I mean, what they were planning to do with it is an abstract question. For all we know, they have a giant dehumidifier on the way. Or were just going to harvest our cows and then leave. Hard to argue with what is not in evidence.

What is manifestly dumb is that they are walking around in an atmosphere that is effectively filled with corrosive acid, without any protection, and it doesn't seem to bother them, but getting spinkled with droplets of it causes their skin to sizzle?
 
DaveC426913 said:
I mean, what they were planning to do with it is an abstract question. For all we know, they have a giant dehumidifier on the way. Or were just going to harvest our cows and then leave. Hard to argue with what is not in evidence.

What is manifestly dumb is that they are walking around in an atmosphere that is effectively filled with corrosive acid, without any protection, and it doesn't seem to bother them, but getting spinkled with droplets of it causes their skin to sizzle?
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But apart from that, I thought it was a really good film! Creepy as hell, well acted, the kids were great.
I mean they used crop circles to communicate and co-ordinate their efforts, rather than something more sophisticated than squashed grass, having just traversed a galaxy, probably reconciled gravity and quantum mechanics, could blend in with the environment to the extent they were essentially invisible but putting that to one side, it was a great film.

EDIT: The aliens probably should have used something more covert than normal radio frequencies, that could be picked up on something as simple as a baby monitor and interpreted as non terrestrial by an 8 year but apart from that, a great film.
 
Pinball1970 said:
But apart from that, I thought it was a really good film! Creepy as hell, well acted, the kids were great.
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If you don't think too hard about the plot holes, I don't disagree.

I was genuinely spooked the first time one of the bug-eyes walked on-screen.

Pinball1970 said:
EDIT: The aliens probably should have used something more covert than normal radio frequencies, that could be picked up on something as simple as a baby monitor and interpreted as non terrestrial by an 8 year but apart from that, a great film.
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Maybe they didn't think of us as intelligent. I bet if we went to another planet to harvest their bug-eyed cow-monsters, we wouldn't think they'd be listening in.
 
“Disclosure Day”
The sequel will put it into perspective.
The aliens turn out to be demons, and it’s the International Organisation of United Religions that are trying to stop world panic if that truth got out.
 
DaveC426913 said:
Maybe they didn't think of us as intelligent.
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They would have detected radio signals and whatnot about 100 light years out. They also would have picked up on the two atomic bombs dropped in the 1940s, three mile Island and Chernobyl. They knew were smarter than your average bovine.
 
Pinball1970 said:
They would have detected radio signals and whatnot about 100 light years out. They also would have picked up on the two atomic bombs dropped in the 1940s, three mile Island and Chernobyl. They knew were smarter than your average bovine.
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And 'our' deliberate space transmissions to our farthest space probes.
 
Pinball1970 said:
I was going by the earliest since they all travel at c through a vacuum. In "contact" it was the 1936 Olympic games. Not sure that's right.
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I don’t know for sure either, but, I can see your point.
I was thinking of strength of signal, hence my thinking of our transmissions to distant probes.
But in the aliens case, it’s not what we transmit out, it’s what weakest signal an advanced technology can detect.
Could they detect Marconi's first transmission?

Quick search resulted in...
" On 13 May 1897, Guglielmo Marconi sent the world's first radio message across open water, and he did it while visiting a seaside resort in Somerset."
BBC Marconi
 
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Pinball1970 said:
They would have detected radio signals and whatnot about 100 light years out. They also would have picked up on the two atomic bombs dropped in the 1940s, three mile Island and Chernobyl. They knew were smarter than your average bovine.
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'Intelligent' is a sliding scale. Using radio and atomic energy may not classify us as intelligent on the scale of threats.

Consider: A dog is very intelligent, on the scale of animals, as well as strong. It's capable of hurting me, and it's capable of moving heavy objects, but it would be silly to consider it a security threat. A closed door will stop it. And it would never occur to me to lock the door when I leave. It's not that kind of threat. It's just a dog.

And the aliens were right in their thinking. Neither our radio spying nor our nukes were actually any threat to them. It turned out to be the simplest, dumbest of physical, bodily dangers. Per my dog analogy - the dog didn't escape my security - it simply bit me.
 
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I wound up watching it as a kind of collateral damage of being along with family.

Even as a mere conspiracy and chase thriller, the action doesn't live up to 21st-century standards. It's like he made this film for a 1980s audience.

The scenes where Scanlon (Colin Firth) has brain sensors attached to remote-control Kellner's girlfriend are right out of some cheap sci-fi melodrama from that decade. The obligatory car chase is dull and primitively lame. As mentioned before about the animals, the CGI often resembles the quality of the 1990s.

As for the ending...

Excluding devout believers, no contemporary population of viewers would be gullible enough to immediately accept the footage that a Kansas City station is broadcasting to a national audience. When such "evidence" is without government and academic authorities attesting that it is real. Again, only a 1980s population and earlier -- where generative AI and complex CGI are still in the future -- would gawk and gape in astonishment like that at the footage being a valid revelation.
_
 
C C said:
I wound up watching it as a kind of collateral damage of being along with family.

Even as a mere conspiracy and chase thriller, the action doesn't live up to 21st-century standards. It's like he made this film for a 1980s audience.
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Interesting. It wouldn't surprise me if that weren't an accident. He does like writing to that era.

It may be a failed attempt at nostalgia. Of course, it won't work when set in the 21st century.
 
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DaveC426913 said:
Interesting. It wouldn't surprise me if that weren't an accident. He does like writing to that era.

It may be a failed attempt at nostalgia. Of course, it won't work when set in the 21st century.
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May have even initially considered the idea of setting it the '80s, but that immediately tanked for the obvious reason. ("Did everyone's memory get wiped prior to the current day or do we resort to a parallel universe with an alternate history?")

Whereas Kane Parsons -- if he had detested the idea of mobile devices messing up "Backrooms" somehow -- faced no contradictions or challenges to placing it in 1990 with the plot of that film. (Apparently that wasn't it, though. Gen-Z is just creeped out by the semi-familiarity of 1990s environments on the whole.)
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DaveC426913 said:
Though this is all the rage, I have not seen it, nor do I know what's it's about, and the one Millennial who mentioned said to give it a pass.
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It kind of reminded me of the 1972 version of Solaris, especially at the very end. But with the "alien intelligence" whose motivations and weird simulacra style of communcation (that not even the researchers could decode and understand) transferred to Earth. Visiting or exploring maybe.

Coincidentally, the immediate and soaring success of Parson's first film might even herald that he's the next Spielberg. Or massively not. Alternatively, he may just retreat back into his YouTube endeavors if the studios or distributer A24 can't drag him out again.
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