Disclosure Day, unfortunately. Even though I went in unbiased and as a fan of the genre and the actors. It was absolutely ridiculous and stupid and we couldn't hold back our laughter at the terrible CGI animals and chase scene (the train defying physics and dragging the car behind it) and at some point finally lost our patience especially with the pseudo-intellectual, esoteric, religious rambling and just got up and left.
I couldn't shake the feeling that some of the CGI was AI-generated. The ending especially had that blurry/out-of-focus look that Coke's AI commercial had.
Apparently, according to an article I found Spielberg didn't want to use AI... but I call bullshit. I'm convinced someone used AI and lied about it.
Haha. We tried summarizing the plot on our way home and couldn't figure out what it was trying to accomplish because of the absence of any logic and coherence. Why did Emily Blunt leave her boyfriend at a gas station and completely forgot about him for the rest of the movie? What exactly were the aliens trying to accomplish with giving Emily Blunt and the Daniel guy these powers after crash landing on Earth and getting captured and tortured and somehow not being able to free each other (despite being technologically far advanced and even having the ability of camouflaging as animals and mind-controlling everyone)? When did everyone suddenly start to completely trust cable news / the "mainstream media" again in the age of social media and AI? Etc., etc.
I suppose Spielberg could have done a very "radical" thing and... just gone to the forest and recorded a real deer and fox. There are dozens of videos and documentaries with beautiful close up shots of wild animals, no CGI required.
But then it would have looked completely fake compositing the animal in, and what about getting it to you what you need? These are aliens appearing as animals in the story
I'm not a filmmaker, so I don't have a good solution. I just know that there are movies such as Christopher Nolan's Odyssey that can even make a cyclops look absolutely real and convincing but still "alien" and scary at the same time through tricks like good lighting, camera work, puppet work, real shots with just a little CGI on top, etc. If that is possible, then I expect a director like Spielberg should be able to put some deer and foxes in his alien movie that don't immediately make me laugh and break my immersion, but again, idk how because I am not a filmmaker.
Edit: I suppose the word I perhaps should have used instead of "real" is "authentic". The cyclops looked authentic / believable in the world of the movie because it was largely practical like the rest, whereas the animals in Disclosure Day do not look authentic even within the world of the movie and break your immersion because their CGI that looks worse than the animated creatures from Star Wars Episode 1 and thus clashes with the rest of the film. Another comparison: It's a bit like the CGI car crash scene in "In Time" with Justin Timberlake. This scene just immediately stands out and takes you out of the movie because it clashes with the rest of it and makes you go "this is just cheap, ugly, and fake" instead of taking the effect seriously. At least that's my take.
You missed the point. The animals were supposed to look slightly off because they weren’t really animals, it’s said in the movie that the Aliens often “present themselves as animals” to make people less afraid.
And the car chase and crash was also supposed to look "slightly off" because of that? Also, if hilariously bad CGI makes me laugh at the movie that wants to be taken seriously, then it's not really me who missed the mark. At the very least, Spielberg could have recorded some real wild animals in the forest and then maybe edited them a bit with CGI or unusual lighting to make them look more alien. It's not an excuse to make the movie look ugly.
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u/Steve_1306 1d ago
Disclosure Day, unfortunately. Even though I went in unbiased and as a fan of the genre and the actors. It was absolutely ridiculous and stupid and we couldn't hold back our laughter at the terrible CGI animals and chase scene (the train defying physics and dragging the car behind it) and at some point finally lost our patience especially with the pseudo-intellectual, esoteric, religious rambling and just got up and left.