Steven Spielberg - classic or dud

Looking at that list above I realize I've disliked a LOT of his movies, without even really realizing they were Spielberg flix. I mean the only movies that I like in that list are Raiders, Last Crusade, Duel, Catch Me If You Can (and that's not even an active like because I forgot I saw it until recently) and...uh...well, I don't actually like Jurassic Park at ALL but Jeff Goldblum dresses fantastically in it so I'll give it a little bit of a pass (THAT FINAL SHOT OF THE T-REX AND THE RAPTORS IS THE ABSOLUTE WORST SHOT IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY AND DIRECTION AND THAT IS A STONE COLD FACT PEOPLE). I'd like Saving Private Ryan better if the bookends were deleted and it was about a half hour shorter.

Dr. Morbius, how about you discuss the "disturbing adult themes" in, say, Catch Me If You Can?

jaws fucking rules ally. jpark3's pretty great, the best of the bunch no doubt. poltergeist was pretty great. band of brothers was incredible. into the west was rousing fun.

Jaws does NOT fucking rule!

UNIFIED WORKS suck anyway

ie his refusal to end his recent movies unyuckily is the price he is prepared to pay for the chance to shoot [x] idea

i don't buy this really, but i wd admire SS lots if i discovered this is where he's secretly at

oh, begone intentionality! i think most movies are compendia of bits with lots of redundancies put in to keep front office happy. it's always been like that(?). spielberg is a total enigma as a man -- i have read a biography of him and know NOTHING about him.

but cutting through or ignoring the 'greatest generation' blah i've been impressed by the action scenes in the saving private ryan/band of brothers projects.

as with albums, ignore the rubbish bits.

My hyperbole is totally correct, watch JP again and wait for it...that final shot of the freaking T-Rex. Claymation dinosaur, why you ruin shot all the time? I would've liked Jurassic Park better if there was no dinosaurs, but instead Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider.

Anyway I am still interested in finding out how Spielberg classics like Catch Me If You Can or The Terminal or The Lost World explore more disturbing, dark, and adult themes than Bamboozled and are more complex than The Big Lebowski! I'll give Morbius Soderberg.

XPOST ARGH STOP IT WITH THOSE MORPHED ANIMALS

Does this make him classic, or just Darryl Zanuck reborn?

I stick with my B+ assessement. He has good chops, and a consistent record. I like him OK, but nothing he makes excites me much.

aimless -- steve is hurt, but he will try to improve his record for next semester.

what's your point here exactly? that people in film school like him because he's successful? wtf does that have to do with anything

>how about you discuss the "disturbing adult themes" in, say, Catch Me If You Can?<

No, not a classic. Quite a decent Missing/Inadequate Dad Complex meditation (major Spielberg motif), tho, with both Leo and Walken putting in unusually deep performances before returning to check-cashing roles.

The Terminal: America as Last Best Melting Pot AND Dubya's Fortress ("America is closed").

JP2 was the last of his I skipped.

I think Walken's performance in Catch Me If You Can is completely immemorable, as immemorable as he gets, at least. Also, I'm not sure how I understand in what way Savion Glover's character in Bamboozled is any more of a "2-D sketch" than Leonardo DiCaprio's character here (note: this does not imply that DiCaprio's character IS a "2-D sketch"). And yes, the 25th Hour beats the crap out of both of these movies, and anything Spielberg's done in, oh, 10 or 15 years. I was keeping off the sucka punches on the "Spielberg more provocative than Lee" comment but if you wanna kick yourself in a metaphorical discussion-genitals go ahead!

Not quite. Film schoolies love him because he is the archetypal film school product. Speilberg sat through all the same classes, learned all the same rigamarole as them and then he went out and became the Nu Robot Overlord of films. It sprinkles fairy dust (read: imagined money & power) over the whole film school experience.

Never said that. But Lee can't really fake provocation regularly anymore. Cine-hipsters turn to City of God, Y Tu Mama Tambien etc for that pose now.

Yeah, Walken's much more memorable sleepwalking through gangster and vampire roles, or SNL. Hey, he recites lines off the expected beats!

I was quite moved by the ending of The Terminal and chilled by A.I.

By the same token Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't make $250 million as an actor by being chopped liver, either. Although it is rather hard to pin down exactly what his talent was. Your point being?

The trailer before this one was for the JJ Abrams-produced The End of Oak Street, which contained nothing but Spielberg go-to moves.

Someone was making fun of that one yesterday, so I googled it, and it's the guy that wrote and directed "It Follows." So, while I am not optimistic, I am I suppose more intrigued than if it were, say, strictly JJ Abrams (who already made his nothing but Spielberg go-tos movie).

Yeah, I liked Super 8 and have completely forgotten it, and I'd take a chance on this one.

Maybe if it didn't waste so much time with the silly alien stuff the characters might have has a better opportunity to reveal themselves, lol. Anyway, just further emphasizes Spielberg's gifts. Like Hitchcock (again), there is just so much of *him* in his movies, overtly or no, and his presence is often the best thing about his films, successes, disappointments and everything in between.

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, June 21, 2026 6:21 AM (three hours ago)

that's the thing, he's made plenty of movies _without_ the silly alien stuff, and they tend to be great movies, and i'd argue that's _not_ as much of *him* in them, because the "silly alien stuff" is absolutely integral to who he is as a person. he truly, genuinely believes in aliens. i don't believe aliens are real, any more than i believe a man can fly, and i _do_ believe in what spielberg is _saying_ in this film. i believe that this film has meaning and purpose and vision that wouldn't be _there_ if it weren't for the silly alien stuff. it kind of, to me, emphasizes the spielberg's humanity. it's something that makes him distinct, not like everybody else, and my instinct is to look at someone who believes aliens are real and see that as a cognitive limitation. well, everything has two sides, though, and he takes this belief which, really, _isn't_ scientific, _isn't_ empirically rooted, as much as spielberg might want to believe it's fact, and turns it into a strength. the sense of wonder in his movies is to some extent his own. he genuinely believes that aliens are real, and immediately extends that to "i wonder what they're like? i wonder what they have to say to us?"

the characters reveal themselves in small ways, in small moments, through the actors as much as through the script and cinematography, which is _very_ interesting to me. i do think that hugo, as a character, has the depth that he does because of domingo. daniel, on the other hand... i don't know, maybe there is depth of character to him, but a lot of his motivations are fridge logic to me. i'm sorry, what? this man spent 22 months or whatever in _federal prison_? i do not see that in josh o'connor's performance. maybe it's there and i'm just not seeing it, idk, maybe it was a Club Fed or whatever. o'connor just imbues daniel with this _guilelessness_ that doesn't really fit with daniel's actions throughout the film. i see him playing daniel as sort of the standard action hero doofus. maybe it'll come across different on rewatch!

Hanks: The scene in Jaws when they’re comparing scars and their broken hearts, and it’s those great actors, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider and Robert Shaw. That kind of camaraderie — I don’t know that Steven’s had that with other men outside of the director community. He gets together with Francis and Marty and Guillermo del Toro and all those guys, and he’s in the warm embrace of like-minded male companionship. I think he yearns to have that. Look at the relationship between Dreyfuss and François Truffaut in Close Encounters. There’s even a great scene in Jaws when Scheider is just sitting with his son and his son starts doing imitations of him at the dinner table.

ok it's this bit from the oral history, this, i think, articulates where spielberg is coming from on hugo's character. and i'm not sure that's exactly the same place domingo is coming from! that's ... i love that the film has room in it for both of those takes. like spielberg is clearly present in most of the films he makes, but he's not the _only_ presence. i'd have to see 1941 to see what happened there... reading the oral history makes it sound like he kinda got overwhelmed by all the other presences in there.

Ha, I didn't mean that aliens were innately silly, just silly in (or at least the least interesting aspect of) this movie. It's funny, for as much as he has returned to the very personal alien well, never has he addressed the questions you raised: I wonder what they are like? I wonder what they have to say to us?

From a quick skim read I'm going against the grain in this thread in thinking that this was pretty awful, sorry.

To give at least some reasoning - my main problem was the writing. The plot was riddled with clichés and egregious holes, but not in a way that felt deliberate or knowing at all. I felt it was meant to be a serious film, but I was on the verge of laughing at much of its more excessive hokum.

Nice interview with the extremely well-cast anchor from the end of the movie:

https://slate.com/culture/2026/06/disclosure-day-movie-ending-cast-anchor-courtney-grace.html

Still didn't love the ending, but the anchor's performance does a lot to move it down from total to manageable silliness.

What does it say that she is at the least one of if not the most compelling actor in this (imo)?

She was great and I thought she helped make the ending great.