With the White House Focused on UFOs, Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’ Arrives at Exactly the Right Moment
It is hard to remember the last time a Steven Spielberg film generated this much curiosity and attention before its release. "Disclosure Day" (Disclosure Day) already feels almost like a phenomenon, with rumors circulating online for months since it was first known as Spielberg’s new, mysterious project, and it is hard to remember when one of his films in recent decades was wrapped in such secrecy, when it was known only by the working title The Dish. In recent days, social media has been flooded with videos of Spielberg being treated like a superstar in different places around the world, including a London pub he unexpectedly visited and where he surprised patrons with a quiz about his work. Given that the man once considered cinema’s eternal boy is about to turn 80 this coming December, that adulation certainly means something. "Disclosure Day" trailer (courtesy of Tulip Entertainment)
On my way home from the film’s advance screening on Tuesday night, American members of Congress called for the disclosure of what is known about encounters with UAP, the term now common in the American government and scientific community for events or objects that cannot be explained. This bipartisan call demands transparency, "the American people should know the truth," as well as protection for whistleblowers, meaning those who possess information and want to reveal it. Legislators such as Republican Anna Paulina Luna and Democrat Jared Moskowitz, as well as former intelligence officer David Grusch, who was exposed to information in the course of his work, have led calls on the White House to grant broad immunity and cancel nondisclosure agreements so that those who know can testify openly about secret UFO technologies. When you add to that the videos, disappointing as they were, released by the Trump administration just about a month ago showing UAP, it feels as if everything happening in reality is merely a prelude, or a publicity campaign, for Spielberg’s new film. And indeed, "Disclosure Day" seems like Spielberg’s most political film in years, more than "The Post" and perhaps even more than "Munich." It is certainly a UFO film, but even before that it is a conspiracy thriller in the spirit of 1970s paranoia movies. Its final segment, without giving anything away, even leaves me wondering whether Spielberg is showing us authentic material related to UAP, and if not, perhaps material based on authentic sources that are waiting somewhere for the day of disclosure. For me, this is no less a closing of the circle with "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977) than it is a dialogue with "The Fabelmans," Spielberg’s autobiographical 2022 film, in the sense that it offers an understanding of his entire body of work (in that earlier film, it was family trauma that became the artistic foundation of a lonely Jewish boy who wanted to bring his mother and father back together).
"Disclosure Day" opens with a scene in which secret government agents force a rogue employee, Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), to return a case containing secret material related to the subject that brought us here, as well as a device that is the product of alien technology, the possibilities, and dangers, of which need not be discussed here. But Kellner manages to escape, and from that moment he and his companion (Eve Hewson), a nun who has lost her calling, find themselves fleeing agents of the agency called Wardex, headed by a manipulative figure named Scanlon (Colin Firth, looking like Orson Welles). The agency, it turns out, is responsible for secret evidence concerning encounters with unidentified beings, some of them dating back to the Nixon era, which is to say conspiracy. On the other side of the scale, the side of the "good guys," is a mysterious figure named Hugo (Colman Domingo) who, together with several other agency employees, is hiding in a giant hangar where a model of a typical suburban house is being built, the kind we remember from "Close Encounters" and "E.T.," for reasons that will be made clear in the film’s final act.
The film’s second heroine is Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City television meteorologist, whose not-at-all-random encounter with a red cardinal bird triggers linguistic and cognitive changes in her. She begins speaking fluent Russian and Korean, and reading the thoughts of strangers, a great way to avoid a traffic ticket, read the policeman’s mind and figure out what really bothers him, and it is not the speed at which you were driving. A truly strange incident that occurs in the middle of delivering the weather forecast makes clear to us that the encounter with the red-breasted bird was significant beyond imagination, and a phone call from Hugo sends her too, along with her skeptical partner (Wyatt Russell, son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn), onto the road and into flight from Wardex agents. Are Daniel and Margaret, why do aliens choose white Westerners as their emissaries on Earth?, the embodiment of the messiah? It is hard not to think so, especially because of the film’s religious context, the former nun companion, and the presence of an abbess (Elizabeth Marvel) who delivers one of its key lines: "It is unthinkable that this entire universe was created just for us." And here is the question, if superhuman beings do exist, what do we do with God? How would that affect all the religions in the world? Stanley Kubrick already wondered about this in "2001: A Space Odyssey," which in fact was entirely about the divine. But this question now, 60 years later, gains renewed relevance. Such a discovery could shake the foundations of religion no less than the theory of evolution, but Spielberg, who directs from a script by David Koepp based on a story by Spielberg, tries to reconcile religion and the extraterrestrial presence.
Already in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," he compared the encounter with the aliens, in Devil’s Tower, to the revelation at Mount Sinai. Intense lights and thunderous sounds accompany the moment when the first contact is made. It is one of the great scenes in film history, and Spielberg’s best film, because it creates an analogy to the power of cinema and gives free rein to the force of fantasy. "Disclosure Day" reaches its climax in a scene that also recalls the giving of the Torah, this time with Margaret in the role of Moses. The biblical verse, "And all the people saw the voices" (Exodus 20:15), takes on a current and chilling meaning here, no longer a collective experience centered on a single mountain in the desert, but a revelation taking place simultaneously through countless television screens and mobile phones around the world. Like at Mount Sinai, humanity as a whole witnesses a moment that unsettles the boundaries of the known and the comprehensible, except that the revelation is no longer mediated by the voice of God, but by a global network of images, broadcasts and screens.
All of this happens at a chaotic historical moment. The world, as they say, is in turmoil, mainly because of the North Koreans, and it feels as if we are approaching a full-scale confrontation. But in Spielberg’s film, the eyes are no longer turned upward. We have already found what we were looking for, and now it is time to tell everyone. What we have found is supposed to bring human beings together, almost world peace, listen, he addresses us through his messengers, more precisely the meteorologist who appears in the foreground and the whistleblower armed with the crucial evidence. Moses? Jesus? It hardly matters. Even E.T., in retrospect, was a divine force that came to save a family in distress. Now it is about saving the entire world, not just Private Ryan.
And yet "Disclosure Day," like "The Fabelmans," is a film centered on longing for home and for a formative moment tied to it. This return to moments of innocence, shaped here like a Disney film, with a fox, a deer and a bird, is also Spielberg’s return to the innocence of "Close Encounters" (which also featured representatives of the political establishment seeking to hide the "truth" from us). But in "Disclosure Day," innocence is already gone. This is a moment of disillusionment, just as the childhood home here turns out to be a fiction. Now it is not about a collective fantasy, but about the real thing. We want to know. Strangely enough, the action sequences in the film are its most trivial parts, not to say disappointing, a crushed car from which the two heroes leap onto a speeding train, or a car chase that goes through a house. We have seen better than this, including from Spielberg himself. But as a film that captures the present moment, the exact minute we are living in, "Disclosure Day" certainly does the job, and its final act is very impressive. There is also something moving in the sounds of 94-year-old John Williams, which emerge and remind us of one of the great artistic collaborations of the last five decades, this is the 30th time Spielberg and Williams have worked together, and Williams’ music here sometimes sounds like a farewell.
Spielberg returns to his home ground, and now he is no longer the little boy gazing up at the sky. "Disclosure Day" will probably be a box office success, something Spielberg’s recent films have not enjoyed, to be precise, "West Side Story" and "The Fabelmans" were commercial failures. I suppose some will see it as recycled material, a film that struggles to recapture the magic of "Close Encounters" and "E.T." (especially in a single scene that does feature children). But as a film that speaks to Spielberg’s entire body of work, to what in French is called his oeuvre, this is a significant work. And above all, it leaves us wondering, what message do the aliens have for us? Are we really not alone?
