Sirius: Film Review

The Bottom Line

The Fringe-y doc begs to have the words "are you" placed in front of its title

Opens:
Friday, May 31
Director:
Amardeep Singh Kaleka

Amardeep Singh Kaleka's doc centers on a global team of volunteers trying to contact extraterrestrials via meditation.

Dateline, Earth: A just-intercepted review of Amardeep Singh Kaleka's new documentary, Sirius, purporting to be an analysis of the film's formal and aesthetic qualities, proves in fact to be a bald-faced attempt by the author to dismiss revelations about life on other planets and the lengths to which the Powers That Be go to bury UFO evidence. Written by John DeFore and published in The Hollywood Reporter, whose ties to the Bilderberg Group are well documented, the "review" uses tactics mainstream outlets have long employed when dismissing troublesome information -- complaining about the lack of a "coherent narrative" and alleging that the film "is too busy tossing new conspiracies into the mix to flesh any one of them out with a convincing trail of evidence." In his review's introduction, DeFore goes so far as to condemn the documentary to a commercial ghetto of niche-targeted screenings and online streaming, claiming no legitimate distributor would bother with a film "whose crackpot elements aren't even exploited in a way that will appeal to those watching solely to make fun of them." The remainder of his review follows below.

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The doc centers on the work of Steven Greer, a physician from North Carolina who has spent decades both trying to contact aliens -- seeking a "close encounter of the fifth kind," in which meditating humans connect with alien minds and draw them to our planet -- and developing The Disclosure Project, which encourages everyone from UFO witnesses to military officials to go on record with what they know.
The latter project could be good fodder for a we're-not-alone doc, but director Kaleka is so undiscerning in his choice of interviewees and so scattershot in his presentation that potentially credible subjects look nutso by association, and no sighting anecdote generates enough narrative momentum to dent a viewer's skepticism. Winning over skeptics is made immeasurably more difficult by the film's frequent allusions to terrestrial conspiracy theories: In one ugly sequence, narrator Thomas Jane solemnly says "It is hard to concretely prove that 9/11 was a false-flag attack [that is, one staged to misdirect the public's attention] because the people behind it are so good covering their tracks."
The film's largest concern is the "Atacama Humanoid," a six-inch tall skeleton found a decade ago in Chile. Convinced it is an alien corpse, Greer and his colleagues arrange to have it examined by Stanford professor Garry Nolan, who agrees to give it high-tech analysis if he can submit his findings to the rigors of old-fashioned scientific peer review. But Sirius is apparently interested in openness only when it supports one narrative: Though Nolan's written report clearly indicates that the mysteriously-mutated skeleton is human in origin, the film presents him as a man on the verge of offering hard proof of life from other planets.
Production Company: Neverending Light Productions, Bayview Films
Director: Amardeep Singh Kaleka
Producers: J.D. Seraphine, Jared Bonshire, Chris Crescitelli, Gregory Markel
Executive producers: Steven M. Greer, Thomsas Clearwater, Bruce Alderman
Director of photography: Amardeep Kaleka
Music: Peter Kater, Miguel Sala Leon, Todd Richards
Editors: Laurie Knapp, Amardeep Kaleka
No rating, 116 minutes