Steven Spielberg’s new movie Disclosure Day ends with a global broadcast of previously classified government footage of extraterrestrials and their technology. We see the whole world stop in its tracks, the global village finally united again after so many years apart. Videos of flying saucers, orbs, and little green (or gray) men are simulcast across the world, and everyone’s stunned, speechless. Josh O’Connor and Emily Blunt, our leads and unwitting “passengers” for the aliens and this inevitable day of disclosure, spend two hours running around the country evading a shadow organization called Wordex who’ve been behind the cover-up; they leave their respective spouses for each other as they realize that, when they were 10 years old, they were given special abilities by the aliens: fluency in all known languages, the ability to read math as English, even an inexplicable connection to certain animals. Wordex tries their best, but in the end the story gets out, and 79 years’ worth of conspiracy theories and cover-ups are finally clarified for all the world to see. People take the disclosure at face value, and they’re properly humbled and moved.
Besides a skeptical engineer in a New York control room, no one questions whether these videos are AI-generated. No one even suggests they’re fake. If that wasn’t pushing plausibility to the limit, a nine-foot tall gray alien is wheeled out before O’Connor and Blunt, and again, they’re properly awed. But the audience wasn’t buying it. When I saw Disclosure Day on Friday at the Charles here in Baltimore, half of the theater burst out laughing at first sight of the aliens. It’s the exact cliché depiction seen for nearly a century, and growing up in an outer space saturated pop culture, it’s ridiculous. You just don’t buy it. Now, the movie had everyone by the throat for most of its 136 minutes—it starts at full tilt and never really lets up, without ever becoming exhausting. Disclosure Day is Spielberg’s best movie in 20 years, the work of a master filmmaker who can’t help but make a good movie; it’s also hopelessly naive and out of touch with the world today.
Disclosure Day is prime Hollywood entertainment, but if a global simulcast of classified alien footage happened now, there’s no way it would go down like this. Most people would doubt any of it’s real—how can you trust an image or a video of an alien in the age of AI? Beyond that, people all over the world have been disillusioned by their media, their government, and their leaders over the past 10 years, to the point that any authentic “disclosure” is just never going to be taken seriously. After September 11, our country managed a level of camaraderie and unity that, however temporary, was very real and palpable; those born after 2001 are too young to remember find this implausible, and I understand why. It does feel like another lifetime, one in which Disclosure Day wouldn’t merely be another well-made Spielberg action movie, but a cultural event on the level of his Close Encounters with the Third Kind.
The kids in the back of the theater laughed at Spielberg’s vision of humanity. His blithe optimism and belief in the essential goodness of humanity is undermined by the film’s denial of today’s world. Like so many modern movies, Disclosure Day avoids any specific mention of the countless calamities around the world today, never daring to mention Donald Trump, the Middle East, the COVID-19 pandemic, criminal migrants, twentysomething assassins or Silicon Valley. Although the film moves at a quick clip, we’re given enough snatches of conversation and radio broadcasts to know that the world is “about to enter World War III,” in a conflict separate from the aliens that we never learn anything about.
No surprise there: Spielberg’s never been a politically sophisticated filmmaker, nor has he ever been much of a thinker, but he’s nailed the mood of the moment a few times, most notably in 2005’s War of the Worlds, the most evocative September 11 movie ever made by Hollywood. It’s an H. G. Wells adaptation with giant monsters destroying the world, but when those pods erupt and start destroying New Jersey, Dakota Fanning has one line that brings everything into focus: “Is it the terrorists?!” Only four years out from the attacks, the panic and confusion were still vivid, and before you knew it, you were reliving that day and that fall in the middle of this gigantic Hollywood blockbuster. It worked, and it meant something back then.
Now? Who believes in the government anymore? Whether you’re on the left or the right—or the Z-axis—it’s impossible to trust and believe in so much we took for granted before 2020. Armond White put it well: “Was Spielberg alive during the Lockdowns, the 2020 election? Disclosure Day is the work of someone who denies how dominated Americans were open to manipulation by religion, the defense industries and the media.” And while I understand the impossibility of even addressing Israel in a movie like this, you can’t help but think of the Middle East when nuns are comforting Christians in a crisis of faith. This movie would’ve been massive in 2002, and would’ve been better than Minority Report, a really disturbing movie that glosses over its chilling premise in favor of a routine murder mystery. That movie didn’t make me feel good in the summer of 2002; this, on the other hand, probably would’ve had me in tears, just as War of the Worlds did three years later.
But that was an alien movie “where there is no love and no attempt at communication,” and that’s always been the most likely scenario to me. I know I’m not alone; then again, I’m just a simple human, and I don’t speak click-click like Emily Blunt. If there are “passengers” among us, Spielberg must know more than us, because why the obsession with extra-terrestrials? I’ve got to believe that he’s seen nine-foot-tall grays, because otherwise, he’s just reiterating his youth yet again, returning to The Day the Earth Stood Still long after the start of our current violent shuffle. It’s a dumb, patronizing movie, but its craft is so superb it doesn’t matter. He’s hopelessly out of touch and not all that bright, but as a director, he’s not at all rusty, and one can only hope we get more films out of him in his 80s. Or has the mothership already come and whisked him away?
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM