Melissa and I just got back from seeing Disclosure Day, and I want to talk about it.

However, Melissa doesn’t have a lot of fun talking about movies and stories with me, because I overthink a lot of things. To her, it probably feels like an argument.

The movie just came out, and I don’t want to spread spoilers. Hell, with the movie so fresh in my mind, I’m not even sure I’m ready to give it a grade or critique.

If you’re here for some kind of review of the movie, I’ll give some non-spoiler information. Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor were fantastic. All the actors were great, really. The movie looked good, with some excellent suspense. I think you should see the movie for yourself and judge it on your own.

I think people are going to talk about the ending, and I don’t think they’re going to be kind. I foresee YouTube essays trying to explain the ending in the most banal ways possible, missing the point of the movie and ignoring the underlying message, even if it is quite explicit.

Some things happened in the movie that people are going to complain about, and I understand why Spielberg made the choices he made, from a very utilitarian perspective.

I really want to criticize something in this movie, but it would get into spoilers. I won’t do that.

Instead, let me take a couple of moments to talk about Glass, because that’s been out a while. Glass is M. Night Shyamalan’s third movie in the series he started with Unbreakable. It completes the trilogy, and at the end, wipes the slate clean of any supernatural heroes or villains.

The action at the end with Bruce Willis grappling with James McAvoy is tame by comparison to modern superhero movies, but I think it’s a valid artistic choice which does more to ground these characters in our world. They do things that are extraordinary, beyond what one would think a regular human capable of doing, and all of this action is captured on video, which the survivors upload to The Internet.

Glass’s true antagonists aren’t Sam Jackson or James McAvoy, but the super secret group lead by Sarah Paulson. The secret group killed the special people and cleaned up the mess so as to keep society safe from the knowledge of supernatural people living among us.

The only way the heroes can win is for this super secret group to be foiled, which is what uploading the footage to The Internet is supposed to do. The surviving loved ones meet at a train station and watch to see if the footage has an impact. Their hope is rewarded. The secret is out there.

Here’s the problem, though: people are not so easily swayed.

We are divided, cynical, and rightfully untrusting of videos posted to The Internet. With the prevalence and the unfortunate embrace of generative A.I., it’s all too easy to create realistic looking footage in support of an agenda or a big, stupid lie.

The current President of the United States is a conman and a blathering idiot, and a third of this country still thinks he’s the second coming of Christ. They are not swayed by what their eyes and ears are presenting them.

In Glass, Shyamalan is overly optimistic about the power of media swaying folks. The naive solution to his story is to just tell the people the truth. The light will banish the shadows of the secret organization, and we will all rise up together in solidarity, uplifted and united in our new found and shared knowledge.

That’s just not how the world works.

Our world is fertile soil for lies and ignorance to spread, weeds clogging out the truth and stunting the growth of productive thought. Just look at Flat Earthers. They would rather listen to their own “common sense” and make up stuff to fill the gaps of their understand than accept knowledge earned by others through hard work. Incurious, regular folks embrace conspiracy theorizing rather than take the time to look critically.

So, at that point in Shyamalan’s Glass, I fell out of the story in disbelief and couldn’t get back into it. I still enjoyed the movie up to that point, and think it’s brilliant in some ways, but I’m ultimately disappointed with how that trilogy concluded.

Once you’ve seen Disclosure Day, let me know, and we can talk about that movie instead of Glass.