‘The Odyssey’ Proves It: Audiences Want Movies Made the Hard Way

Project Hail Mary was VERY good! I highly recommend going to the theatre to see this one. So nice to have an optimistic, fun sci-fi movie. Next to Dune II, I can't remember a movie I enjoyed this much in a theatre. 

📼 Forgot to post this before the new year... Best movies of 2025 easily Bugonia and One Battle After Another. Bugonia was like nothing I've ever seen before. One Battle After Another was one of the wildest movies I've ever watched. The narrative and chaotic pace are a masterclass. You can't look away. I also thought it was some of Leo's best acting. Also, Sean Penn is incredible.

The Spielberg Disclosure Theory: Cinema as Ontological Shock Absorber

There is a problem with extraterrestrial disclosure that has nothing to do with technology, evidence, or credibility.

It is psychological.

If tomorrow morning every government on Earth held a joint press conference and confirmed the existence of non-human intelligence, the shock would not be scientific. It would be ontological. People would lose their shit. It would be a DISASTER. It would destabilize religion, identity, power, and meaning all at once. Humans are not built for sudden redefinitions of their place in the universe. 

So the question becomes not if disclosure happens, but how.

This academic white paper (disguised as a personal blog entry on don.earth) proposes a speculative but structurally coherent theory. That Steven Spielberg, the most culturally influential filmmaker of the last half-century, has functioned (knowingly or unknowingly) as the primary narrative instrument for gradual extraterrestrial disclosure. Not through facts or announcements, but through emotional rehearsal. Through cinema.

This is not a claim of conspiracy (although it sounds like it). It is a theory of cultural conditioning.

Phase 1: Awe Without Threat

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Any responsible disclosure would begin by removing fear.

Close Encounters does exactly this. The aliens are not invaders. They are not conquerors. They are musicians. They communicate through tone, pattern, and harmony. The first language between species is not English. It is through a frequency, a resonance.

Importantly, the government already knows. Civilian populations are evacuated under false pretenses. Information is controlled. Contact is staged carefully, in isolation, with selected individuals.

The film establishes the core architecture of the disclosure framework. The truth exists. Institutions manage it. The public is not yet ready.

And crucially, contact is framed as transcendent rather than catastrophic.

Phase 2: Emotional Normalization

E.T. (1982)

Once awe is introduced, the next step is intimacy.

E.T. relocates the alien from the cosmic to the domestic. He is small, fragile, and childlike. He suffers. He needs help. He forms emotional bonds with a suburban family.

This is a critical psychological shift. The alien is no longer an abstraction. He is a being with fear, attachment, and vulnerability.

Authority figures, meanwhile, are portrayed as invasive and harmful. Their faces obscured. Their methods clinical. The threat is not the alien. It is how institutions respond to the alien.

Spielberg reframes the moral hierarchy. Contact itself is not dangerous.

Phase 3: Reversal of Perspective

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

A.I. is often miscategorized as a film about machines. It is more accurately a film about post-humanity. And this is one of the quietly most emotional films Spielberg has made. It's a deeply unsettling and cold movie about humanity viewed from afar.

In the final act, humans are extinct. Advanced non-human intelligences study human artifacts like we study fossils. Human emotion is a curiosity. A data set.

The film subtly trains the audience to accept a future in which humanity is not central. Not only does non-human intelligence exist, but it may outlast us, understand us better than we understand ourselves, and remember us as artifacts.

Phase 4: Public Reckoning

Disclosure Day (2026)

Spielberg’s latest film is not subtle.

Disclosure Day centers on a global moment where the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence can no longer be contained. A whistleblower seeks to release the truth to the entire planet simultaneously. Media collapses into spectacle. Institutions scramble. The public is forced to confront something undeniable.

The tagline matters.
“The truth belongs to seven billion people.”

This is the culmination of the arc.

Earlier films were private, selective, and symbolic. Disclosure Day is public, chaotic, and irreversible. Spielberg is no longer asking whether humanity can imagine contact. He is asking whether humanity can survive knowing.

Notably, the threat is not framed as the aliens themselves. The threat is the social response. Information velocity. Media amplification. Psychological overload.

Disclosure becomes not a scientific event, but a cultural one.

Conclusion

When you line these four films up chronologically, a few clear timing patterns emerge that strengthen the argument that this arc is not random, even if it is not intentional in a conspiratorial sense.

1. Each film arrives at a moment of cultural anxiety about human identity

None of these movies appear during periods of confidence. They land during moments when humanity is quietly unsettled about its place in the world.

• Close Encounters (1977)
  Arrives post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, during the Cold War. Trust in government is fractured, but belief in progress still exists. The film channels uncertainty into wonder rather than fear. It reassures rather than alarms.

• E.T. (1982)
  Released during early Reagan-era America, nuclear anxiety, suburbanization, and rising institutional power. The film retreats inward, shrinking the cosmic question into a child’s bedroom. The timing suggests emotional grounding during an era of abstract existential threats.

• A.I. (2001)
  Released months before 9/11, at the height of early internet optimism and quiet dread about technology surpassing humanity. It arrives right as humans begin to fear replacement rather than invasion. The alien becomes time, intelligence, and extinction itself.

• Disclosure Day (2026)
  Lands in an era defined by AI acceleration, information overload, collapsing trust in institutions, and ongoing public discourse around UAPs and non-human intelligence. The cultural conditions now mirror the film’s premise. Too much information, too fast, with no shared meaning-making structure.

2. The films escalate alongside information density in society

Each release corresponds with a new media environment.

• 1977: Broadcast television, limited channels, shared narratives

• 1982: Home video, mass entertainment, family-centered storytelling

• 2001: Internet age, early digital consciousness, fragmented meaning

• 2026: Algorithmic feeds, deep fakes, AI slop, real-time global discourse, no narrative gatekeepers

As society’s ability to process information changes, Spielberg’s framing of contact scales accordingly. Private encounter. Domestic intimacy. Post-human observation. Global reckoning.

The timing suggests an intuitive alignment between narrative scale and media capacity.

3. Spielberg waits until the culture is already asking the question

When you line it all up, what’s most compelling about this theory is not any single film. It’s the timing.

Each of these movies arrives precisely when human confidence is already cracking. Not before. Not after. Right as the question is forming, but before anyone knows how to articulate it. Spielberg does not introduce new fears. He gives shape to existing ones. He does not provoke the panic. He absorbs it.

And perhaps most telling of all, he never gets ahead of the moment. These films do not predict cultural anxiety. They arrive once it is already unavoidable. Once the questions are circulating. Once the old answers no longer hold.

Which leaves us with an unsettling possibility. If Disclosure Day is the final phase, then the work may already be done. The shock has been softened. The emotional groundwork laid. The audience has been trained patiently and subconsciously for over half a century.

Love as SFDC Dashboard: The Movie

Up until now, I didn't think A24 was capable of making a bad movie. But then I saw Materialists... and let me just say, WOOOOOOOOOF.

What a TERRIBLE movie. Like on every level, bad.

Not polarizing. Not misunderstood. Just bad.

I don't even know how to describe it much beyond that. It’s all just so weirdly flat. It was like watching these beautiful NPCs trying to simulate dating and romance while getting stuck in some sort of logic loop.

The dialogue was offensively bad – it felt like some sort of financial-bro erotic fanfiction. Dakota Johnson's character is this high-end matchmaker, and EVERY SINGLE line she delivers emphasizes this corny economics language... everything is salary figures, value metrics, unicorn nomenclature – if a Salesforce dashboard were a movie:

"She's high risk, low ROI."

"They have poor compatibility percentages."

"You've got 6 inches of heigh on him – double your valuation."

CRINGE. It's so scripted and rehearsed that the movie completely loses any sense of emotional realism. The LOVE-AS-A-MARKET schtick gets REALLY OLD, REALLY FAST. 

And no one is gonna convince me that this was satire. It's not (although it does feel like it could be sponsored by Salesforce... which honestly if this was some 4-dimensional sponsored content by Benioff that would be kind of sick). It's just a REALLY bad movie. 

The Shitification of Superhero Movies

Why do all superhero movies feel like airport food? Mass-produced, bland, and always somehow WORSE than you imagine.

I’m exhausted by the industrial shitification of superhero movies – the endless conveyor belt of MCU, DCU universe sludge being pumped out to the masses. 

The new Superman isn’t even a movie. It’s a glorified trailer for the next twelve. A corporate content unit — a meticulously focus-grouped little dopamine pellet, algorithmically optimized, and destined to be licensed into oblivion. Which, honestly, is working because I bought a Superman Slip N' Slide this weekend aaaaaand the Superman popcorn bucket (I AM NOT ABOVE THIS SHIT).

These movie narratives are no longer driven by character or theme — they are driven solely by IP management and quarterly earnings. And you feel that because there is LITERALLY no story here. Just a string of CGI set pieces, stitched together by awkward character introductions and a painfully obvious meme-bait dog built for TikTok virality.

And the worst part? These franchise movies don't end – they're a mere vehicle for endless setups for spin-offs, cameos, and crossovers no one asked for. There is never closure. Just the illusion of plot in service of perpetual content churn. 

It sucks. But what sucks more is how normalized it’s become. It’s not just that movies are getting dumber — it’s that we’re adjusting to it.

Best of 2024

There was one song that was by far the best song of 2024 – it was so good that Steph and I had to go see it played live. Waxahatchee has given us an 🎶INSTANT American Classic with her song, Right Back To It. It's perfect.

I have not watched as many movies this year, but obviously, the best movie of the year was Dune Part 2.

Anora somehow lives up to the hype. We watched it last night, and it was VERY good. Civil War also surprised me (a bit heavy-handed and reaching, but entertaining for a plane movie). The Substance was TERRIBLE btw – totally overrated.

Kinds of Kindness was good, but it felt like they were trying a bit too hard. Like the writer saw Poor Things and said, "I can do this shit" and hired the exact same cast. 

Favorite Things of 2022

Big Thief put out the best album of the year – a true masterpiece.  

Also very good:
Dehd – Blue Skies

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Cool it Down

Top Gun (USA USA USA!) was my favorite movie of the year. Anyone who doesn't like this movie is trying too hard. It's a good movie. Everything Everywhere All at Once actually lived up to the hype. Also, the Unbearable Weight of a Massive Talent.

📼 Movies

Everything Everywhere All At Once
Wow. This is one of the best sci-fi movies I've ever seen. It was like nothing I've ever seen before. It felt like The Matrix if The Matrix had an emotional foundation. 

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Nic Cage as Nic Cage. Say no more. Incredible movie.