Naïveté stirs itself into hyper-optimism in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. Spielberg — a talented filmmaker who could be the next M. Night Shyamalan — returns to blockbuster filmmaking with a hope-pilled dream of alien encounters. Disclosure Day is about aliens, which it earns, and the monocultural reverence of legacy media, which it cannot earn, and seems less realistic than the first item. When Spielberg has crafted two of the best alien-forward movies ever, Close Encounters (1977) and ET (1982), deeply important films that shaped the genre, it’s hard to imagine Disclosure Day being the cumulative result of what the filmmaker has to say on the matter five decades later.
Who is to say that Spielberg has changed at all? Disclosure Day is evidence of consistency. Too late to change now anyway. Now Spielberg is making a modern sci-fi movie set in the present.
Spielberg understands our hearts and minds. Earnest humanism underlines the pathos of his new film. It’s being released into a deeply cynical, broken world, and reflects back something that feels like a real fantasy — a more put-together society where big questions have simple answers and wide-spread collectivism is instantaneously possible. Where something happens and we all turn to our phones to watch cable news for information. Where legacy media can still save the day if everyone would just watch it all at once.
Disclosure Day has been called a Boomer Film but that’s not explicitly what it is. Disclosure Day is a radically hopeful moral allegory, so simply rendering the prime text as outdated denies the main thing it’s actually doing: Wrestling with mythology, as Spielberg has always done, and reflecting back moralistically upon the halcyon years of optimistic sci-fi, some of which the filmmaker spearheaded. Spielberg, to his credit, has made an accessible modern fable in the spirit of his classics.
But you can watch Close Encounters right now. That’s an evergreen recommendation. That movie is vital and will still feel contemporary and immediate because great movies stay that way.
What’s peculiar about Disclosure Day is that it captures, in its entirety, all the stuff that would happen before the movie you want to see. We leave the cinema wanting the movie that happens right when it ends. In that way, it feels preliminary. Watch Disclosure Day, but then also watch Close Encounters, and you’ll get the movie that Disclosure Day is preamble for.
Disclosure Day is well-made. That’s because Mr. Spielberg remains great at making movies. Certain shot choices are startling and remind us that the filmmaker cares deeply about the craft. Some of those shots reminisce on the director’s past works, with exceptional blocking and framing being a given. That’s how Spielberg works. He makes great looking movies and Disclosure Day often looks great. Likewise, spare moments of action have legible geography and those sequences are accomplished. Spielberg has not suddenly started shooting badly or making bad action.
What is it all in service of? The problem is not that Spielberg is generationally out of touch, so much as that the film is a beacon of optimism crashing against the waves of more modern concerns for the future. Our belief in extraterrestrial life has shifted from Cold War anxiety to existential conspiracy. We do not trust information or institutions. Our news is deeply unreliable, both at the levels of mass media and social media. The quick rise of AI asks new questions about what it means to be human. We live more isolated lives and our fears and our hopes are more insular than collectively shared. Science has proven the possibility of extraterrestrial life, a former President noted its existence (and it was a page 2 news story), and there’s nothing at all that unites everyone.
So, Disclosure Day then operates as though none of the above is necessarily true, and that’s where its expression becomes so murky to a modern audience. Spielberg remains one of our greatest living filmmakers. There’s nothing left to prove. There is some kind of sweetness to it, that he’s making such life-affirming sci-fi, when even the biggest sci-fi blockbuster of this year, Project Hail Mary, is so steeped in isolation, and while more reflective of modern anxiety, is also just a patch on another 1970s sci-fi movie, the ideal Silent Running (1972).
Where do we go from here? Spielberg wants to make a western. Ideologically, the western is made for late-era work, longterm reflections upon what has been won and lost with time, and sentimental revisionism. Whereas the western looks back, sci-fi looks forward from the moment we are in, and with Disclosure Day, the core issue is that it’s not forward-thinking, but feels like a preliminary intro to a much better movie the filmmaker has already made.