POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Disclosure Day better be a CE3K sequel
By Dan Brown They say there are too damn many sequels. I don’t agree – in at least one case. If Disclosure Day isn’t a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I’m gonna be pissed. The new Steven Spielberg-directed motion picture about aliens is set to land in theatres on June 12, and I so want it to be the second part of 1977’s Close Encounters. CE3K was the first Spielberg movie I saw in a movie theatre. It blew my nine-year-old brain. Although UFOs were a big deal in the 1970s, it was about more than that: The mystery of the unknown, obsession, belonging, asserting the right of the individual to leave their family. I was sold. So I’ll take a Close Encounters sequel any way I can get it. It doesn’t even have to be a particularly great movie! You may be wondering: How come Dan doesn’t know if Disclosure Day is a sequel or not? You would think, since its debut is only a few days away, I – along with the general public – would understand that much about the plot. But the team behind Disclosure Day is being cagey. No one has said it’s a direct sequel to Close Encounters. However, we do know from the trailers it’s about aliens coming to Earth in flying saucers. And some people connected with the film have been dropping enticing hints. “There are definitely questions posed by Close Encounters that are answered in Disclosure Day,” Emily Blunt told the movie magazine Empire. Blunt, by the way, has been getting positive advance notices for her performance as a TV weather girl who gets up in an unraveling conspiracy. Also, there’s at least two shots in the Disclosure Day trailer that evoke Close Encounters. One has a UFO emerging from a bank of clouds hat, to me, looks like an homage to the climax of CE3K, when the giant mothership descends in full view on Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. There’s also a white house in the woods that looks an awful lot like the one where the little boy gets abducted in Close Encounters. Some are speculating that Disclosure Day is a spiritual sequel – in the same way 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was a spiritual sequel to Close Encounters itself. But that’s not enough for me. You may recall how Star Wars hit theatres about six months before Close Encounters back in the 1970s. I was so jazzed by the combination of these two event movies in close proximity, the combined impact literally changed my life. But looking back, I realize just CE3K on its own would have been a game-changer for me. It sparked my imagination. The characters were so compelling. It made me fall deeper in love with movies. It felt plausible. And it made me . . . optimistic. The message that aliens were here to help us, not hurt us, ran counter to every other alien flick I’d seen by that point. I see more movies at home these days than in the theatres. But a Spielberg film about aliens is a premise I'm not able to resist – and if it’s a sequel, my prayers will have been answered. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
