Earth to Spielberg

Rating: Null/10 (31 July 2004)

As one other writer has phrased it,"What a shame". Apparently Spielberg has been on one of his outer space locales for too long. How could he be so out of touch with the modern world that he could place an individual in a world without computers? Maybe this story is based on an incident that happened fifty years ago or something.
I was so disappointed. The story has such an interesting premise. I thought this film was going to tell about how amazing it is at an modern airport. To tell about all the resources that are available to anyone visiting an airport. I thought that the character was going to make use of the resources at hand and advance himself somehow. Like a modern Robinson Crusoe.
My objection to the film and the reason that I feel it is out of touch is that the main character only relies on news from television to tell him that his country is temporarily out of order. In this story the computer doesn't seem to have been invented yet.
The character has access to all of the knowledge at a Border's bookstore and manages to teach himself English; still he doesn't discover the address of any helpful individual. (I mean, in any movie about Martians the first thing they say is, "Take me to your leader." Spielberg should be familiar with that phrase and yet our hero never tries to contact anyone.) And the character never uses the English language to say "Get me to a computer". With all the information at a Border's bookstore a person would find out eventually that there is this invention called a computer and with it one is in touch with the entire world. One could contact a local news agency to tell them about one's plight or one could contact local officials or Federal officials. One would learn that these are the ways that one gets action in America. With enough time one might learn about what laws could benefit one instead of just being at the mercy of the local airport dictator. Or as I said, just saying in English that one needs to get to a computer would supply you with all you needed to know in Russian. If one didn't know how to use a computer one could find a book at Border's about the how to use the computer. ---I mean this man was supposed to be smart enough to teach himself English and he had nine months to figure out what to do.
There are so many stories about individuals in situations where they have nothing and yet they ingeniously manage to manipulate their environments and to survive, to prosper; still this individual with virtually the entire world at his disposal via the written word at a bookstore and the invention of the internet in the modern world only manages to figure out how to earn enough money to purchase a brand name hamburger and a brand name suit. ---Oh I get it. We've been had. It's an ad.