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.
Welcome to the Age of the Spiritual Sequel
Welcome to the age of the spiritual sequel By Dan Brown There’s been much discussion in recent days about the trailer for the new Steven Spielberg film Disclosure Day. Spielberg is being cagey about the new film’s relationship to his 1977 UFO classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Is Disclosure Day a sequel to Close Encounters? Is it a standalone film? The online debate rages on. Of course, there is one other possibility: It could be set in the same world, but not directly follow the events of Close Encounters. In other words, it could be a spiritual sequel. Which wouldn’t be surprising, since this is the age of the spiritual sequel. There appear to be more and more of them all the time. When the mockumentary series The Paper debuted last year, many reviewers pointed out how it was set in the same world as The Office. It even shared at least one character with its predecessor series. The Creed trilogy follows the six Rocky movies, but the central character is not Balboa himself, but the son of his frenemy Apollo Creed. The Texas college comedy Everybody Wants Some takes place in 1980, four years after Dazed and Confused, which is set in 1976 on the last day of high school. But EWS focuses on a different set of students; you don’t need to have seen the original to understand it. And the Exorcist, which stars Scarlett Johannson, is set for release a year from this March and is not a remake of or direct sequel to the 1973 horror classic, although it is set in the same imaginative universe. Spiritual sequels – which in television were always called spinoffs – make a lot of sense. Pretty much every sequel you can think of has already been made, so billing a movie as a spiritual successor gives studio marketing departments a way to promote a motion picture while also giving directors and producers creative room to manoeuvre. Are they better than direct sequels or prequels? There may be too little information at this point to make a definitive conclusion on that question. It’s probably much harder for filmmakers to capture the “flavour” of a popular motion picture while also creating a story that can stand on its own for those viewers who have no knowledge or memory of the first one. One suspects we are going to see even more of them – look at the Star Wars movies and shows all set in the same galaxy. Having a consistent milieu makes it easier for storytellers to find a launching point they can exploit, a logical entry point into a setting that already feels familiar to fans. Me, I have reason to believe Disclosure Day may be more of a direct sequel to Close Encounters than we’ve been led to believe. When a new trailer dropped during the Super Bowl, there were at least two images that look mighty familiar to me, including a spaceship shrouded in clouds and an isolated white house situated perfectly for an alien abduction. We’ll all find out for sure on June 12, when Spielberg's latest lands in theatres. 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.
