Disclosure Day and other TV notes

I was eleven when Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out. In the days after seeing it, I spent a substantial chunk of my allowance on UFO magazines. Reading them, it seemed undeniable that we were being visited by extraterrestrials. My fascination with UFOs didn’t last long. Most of the stories in the magazines seemed repetitive and my attention was quickly captured by the next shiny thing. But for several years I believed that aliens were in our skies.

I was still a believer when Spielberg’s E.T. came out. It had a similar pattern to Close Encounters, where the central characters found themselves in a situation that they were trying to navigate, but with shadowy authorities of some kind acting as an obstacle and threat. In both cases (spoiler alert) the aliens turn out to be friendly and cute, and the authorities more misguided than evil.

Spielberg’s new Disclosure Day seems cut from a similar cloth. I’m not spoiling anything by noting that it’s also about aliens; it’s revealed early in the movie. But it’s hard to say much more than that without getting into real spoilers. It’s the kind of movie best entered cold. I’ll just say that Spielberg still knows how to tell a captivating story. The movie hooked me early and kept me glued for its entire run.

That said, while I enjoyed it as a fantasy, I think the premise is nonsense. I’ve been a skeptic for the last twenty years or so. And my overall stance toward the idea of UFOs (now UAPs) being extraterrestrial visitors is largely summarized by this XKCD.

Predator: Badlands is a pretty fun movie. It continues with the merger of the Predator and Alien universes. Dek is a Predator and the runt of his family, on a mission to prove himself by capturing an apex predator on a “death planet.” Thia is a Weyland-Yutani android who has lost her legs. She offers to help Dek in his quest. Of course, both Dek and Thia come from pretty dystopian societies and all is not as it seems.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is another fun movie. Like it’s predecessors, it’s visually stunning, an excellent movie to break in a new TV. This installment continues the fight between the Pandoran natives and the human invaders, and moves the arc of all the major characters forward, while making it explicit that everyone who connects with the biosphere ends up being uploaded into it.

It also opens the door to the idea that humans can join that biosphere. Which reminds me of the speculation I indulged in with the previous movie, that the eventual resolution of the conflict between the humans and natives will involve the humans joining that biosphere, or taking it back to Earth. We probably won’t find out if I was on the right track until the final film, which currently is slated to be the fifth one. Interestingly, the description for the fifth installment indicates part of it will take place on Earth.

And then there’s the other Avatar, particularly the second season of the live action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It seems to be following the storyline of the original animated show. I’m sure there are variations, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen the original version, so the differences are lost on me. I’ve seen some reviewers question why this adaptation exists when we have the original. I get that sentiment. I’d personally prefer to see new stories rather than popular ones endlessly revisited. But the show is still fairly well done, and entertaining enough, at least for someone who’s memory of the original series is hazy enough so that it’s not a constant comparison.

I’ve mentioned many times that I was a fan of the original Planet of the Apes franchise back in the 1970s. One of the most captivating efforts came at the tail end of that era, in the form of a Saturday morning cartoon show: Return to the Planet of the Apes. The creators of the show basically took everything that had happened before in the franchise, all the way back to Pierre Boulle’s original novel, and reimagined it.

So we get three astronauts experimenting with time travel who end up crashing onto a planet. All three survive, including the woman. The planet turns out to be a future version of Earth but now run by a fairly advanced civilization of apes, with cars, radio, and TVs but no air travel. Humans are mute but reasonably intelligent, and seen as a threat by many of the apes, who often hunt them. But there is also a secret civilization of humans living underground who have psionic capabilities.

The show is episodic but with an overall continuity and an arc that seemed to be going somewhere, although it was canceled after thirteen episodes, so don’t expect a satisfying ending. The scenery is often bleak and evocative, which is reinforced by the soundtrack, although the animation was very limited in the way a lot of low budget 1970s shows tended to be. And the story had to work within the constraint of children’s shows of the time, so almost no one ever gets killed.

As a child I was captivated by this series, but was never able to see all the episodes. I recently came across the full series on Youtube. It was an interesting walk down memory lane.

I was slow to watch the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters show. While I enjoyed the new American Godzilla and King Kong movies, it was mostly as light throwaway fantasy that doesn’t bear much scrutiny. Monarch is more of the same, although it pulls back a little on some of the pseudoscience of the movies. So rather than a hollow earth, the creatures seem to come through portals from another universe of some type, one where times flows differently, allowing for some interesting stories.

The series shows us the origins and history of the Monarch organization that the movies reveal. It has some interesting characters and situations. For the most part, nothing particularly deep, but worth checking out if you’re just looking for entertainment.

The Mandalorian and Grogu didn’t do well at the theaters. I didn’t see it there, but then I rarely go to the theaters anymore. But I found it perfectly fine when I streamed it. I think a lot of the criticism of this movie is that the story is nothing that couldn’t have just been a season of episodes of the TV show. Obviously Disney was trying to cash in on a popular franchise and it didn’t work. I hope its poor box office doesn’t lead them to cancel it entirely. It was a perfectly fine TV show. Anyway, if you enjoyed that show you’ll likely enjoy the movie too.

That’s what I’ve been watching over the last few months. Have you seen any of these shows? If so, what did you think? Watching anything else interesting?