This movie is stupid. Not in a fun way. It’s just stupid. That would be the TL;DR: The movie is embarrassingly stupid.

Spoilers, but I will warn you.

A guy in charge of cybersecurity for a secret government agency steals a lot of something. They are kind of trying to play around what it is, but if you have seen the trailer, you already know. Anyhow, he escapes with his girlfriend. Meanwhile, a weather woman starts having weird experiences where she just speaks languages and knows a lot about everyone she meets. Somehow, with both being hunted, they need to find each other to do… something.

There’s some pretty grounded action, which is nice, and the performances are good, like you would expect from people in a movie with such a big budget. That’s it for the positives.

Otherwise, and you might think I’m overemphasizing this, but I’m not, the movie is so, so stupid. Just incredibly so. The same guy who wrote Black Bag a couple of years ago also wrote this? How did that happen?

I can’t say much about this without spoiling, but without doing that I can point to the government agency and their complete incompetence. For one. Sure, this can happen when an agency is run by incompetent people, but that’s not what they are going for. Yet, the agency is completely incapable of doing anything proactively. They just wait for something to happen and then react to it. They are not trying to follow multiple avenues at the same time or keeping an eye on obvious places where the people they are looking for would go. The power of these agencies come from resources. They are not employing them in any meaningful ways, which just left me tutting throughout the movie.

Just stay away. Go and see Obsession if you haven’t yet, and I hear Furious is very good. This is the worst Spielberg movie I’ve seen and I’ve seen movies like 1941 and Hook.

Okay, spoilers, because I need to vent.

All of this is a ploy by aliens to let the world know of their existence. In order to do this, they kidnapped a couple of kids, embedded them with superpowers, let them go, and hoped that in 30 years or so all of this would happen. That is so, so (sorry for repeating myself) stupid. So many things could go wrong. What if one of them gets hit by a car and dies? What if one of them gets sick and dies? What if one of them is in jail when all of this is supposed to happen?

On the other hand, ultimately the evidence is that they have an actual living alien with them. So, if the aliens want to world to know about their existence, why wouldn’t they just announce it themselves? After all, while waiting for this thing to happen, they were dying in experiments and being tortured. It would seem, based on the size of the dead aliens compared to the one they have, that the ones being killed and tortured, were children.

This isn’t discussed much, as if Koepp, the writer, knew how stupid this is: The guy part of this equation has been embedded with the ability to understand maths, because that’s helpful in communicating with the aliens. Okay. But we do have a lot of people in the world who can understand maths. Maybe, instead of traumatizing children by abducting them, you try learning human notation for mathematics and give that to actual mathematicians? After all, there are whole research teams doing exactly this right now, when we don’t even have evidence of aliens.

And in the end, this ability to understand the maths, is used very stupidly in the movie anyhow. The alien just tells something to the guy but instead of the guy just conveying this information to the world, the weather woman gets to have a moment in the anchor chair and give this information to the world, because she was dreaming of this earlier in the movie. That is so convoluted. And, yeah, stupid.

I’m not done venting yet. There’s also a religious side to all of this, and it becomes a subplot of sorts. Turns out that our guy’s girlfriend used to be a novice at a convent, but didn’t go through with it. She is still religious. She objects to the evidence being released, because it would destroy people’s belief in higher power, and, according to her, whole civilizations have been built based on that belief.

Where do you even start with something like that? There are hundreds of millions of atheists in the world. Depending on who you ask, irreligious is pretty much on par with Christianity and Islam in terms of number of people people. There’s also religions that don’t believe in higher powers, and many people follow religions not based on belief, but based on cultural norms. So, this whole thing is, once again, stupid.

Actually, when a civilization is built on a belief in higher power, that is used to protect a hierarchy, so losing this belief might be highly beneficial for the population as a whole. All those murderous kings? Chosen by god. So, fuck you Spielberg, fuck you Koepp. You should be ashamed of what you’ve done here.

(Yes, there are other ways dictators have come to power, but organized religion is a tool to maintain that power.)