There’s a kind of magic to many Spielberg movies. The warm, mystical sound of an accompanying John Williams score certainly helps, sweeping the viewer into a sense of nostalgia for the time in our lives when we spent afternoons in the backyard, chasing adventure. Ultimately, Spielberg succeeds at making his movies feel comforting and otherworldly—something both familiar yet captivating.
But what happens when you spend too long trying to replicate what you’ve succeeded at countless times before? You overthink it. You don’t go as deep as you should have. And you get Disclosure Day.
Spielberg’s latest tentpole summer blockbuster opened strong at the box office with a record–breaking $44M, but landed a B CinemaScore—nearly one of Spielberg’s lowest scores. Most of the audience that scored the film low was over 35 years of age. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Spielberg tried too hard to recycle what has already been done before, hoping that a kind of ‘great forgetting’ would compel moviegoers to view his latest film as completely original, instead of a replica of older sci–fi originals like X–Files and E.T.
Disclosure Day’s entire appeal hinges on a secret shared between two seemingly unrelated characters. One is cybersecurity whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who plans to leak files from Wardex, a covert government organization covering up the presence of alien life on Earth. The other character is weather meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), whose life is changed when she wakes up one morning with the ability to read minds.
The film’s first act—a tightly–knit and well–paced thriller—places Daniel and Margaret’s lives on a direct collision course. While Daniel tries to keep both the files and his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) safe from the Wardex agents hunting them, Margaret speaks in an alien language over a live weather broadcast. Seeing her broadcast, the relentless CEO of Wardex, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), sends his agents to retrieve her, but Margaret escapes and uses her powers to locate Daniel.
When Margaret and Daniel finally meet, they have the strange but undeniable impression that they know each other. Determined to figure out their history, they join forces with Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who leads a fleet of former Wardex employees now turned whistleblowers. They want the world to know that Wardex was conducting experiments on alien life that crashed on Earth years ago. Hugo helps Margaret and Daniel remember the day they were both abducted from their homes as children and taken to an alien ship, where they were given special gifts to serve as a bridge between these aliens and the rest of humanity. Thus, Spielberg’s “great secret” propelling the film’s entire mystery is revealed—yet lands as déja–vu and deeply obvious.
In a film meant to question human beliefs about truth and morality, Spielberg doesn’t venture deeply enough into the film’s most obvious human aspects: its characters. Margaret is brought to life by Blunt’s incredible acting, but her character falls short of feeling truly real and lived in. We know little about her personal life—only her childhood trauma of being abducted. Daniel, meanwhile, is solely defined by his tenacity as a whistleblower. His relationship with Jane is superficial, only tested when Wardex uses her as a pressure point to get to him. And Wardex CEO Noah, perhaps the story’s most complicated character, is painted as a one–dimensional, no–good antagonist, despite his underdeveloped history with Hugo and his unexplained ability to wield dangerous alien technology to invade people’s minds.
Additionally, instead of letting the viewer feel and experience the emotional stakes of the story for themselves, Spielberg tells the viewer what to think and how to feel. After Jane learns the government has been torturing aliens, she opposes the idea of exposing the truth to the world. This scene is where Spielberg ultimately loses the viewer. We are not given space or reason to care about the truth at stake; we are instructed to care. Spielberg presents his aliens as one–dimensional and purely good, equated to God–like entities. Unburdened by the human vices of corruption and war, they possess incomprehensible knowledge of the Universe, and give it to Margaret and Daniel—the so–called “Chosen Ones.” Yet Spielberg doesn’t even venture into why Margaret and Daniel were both chosen in the first place.
At the same time, Spielberg’s aliens are depicted as victims of government torture—and this becomes his entire justification for why we as the audience should care about them. The film’s climax comes when the Wardex footage is broadcast globally. Spielberg cuts between people across the world all reacting the same way to the same footage: putting their lives on hold and getting emotional. Even soldiers riding tanks are all somehow on their phones, watching in the stillness of what appears to be World War Three.
While he perhaps attempted to bring a divided world together through the worldwide release of Wardex’s footage, Spielberg alienates us instead. We watch hollow shells of ourselves on screen performing emotions, instead of feeling those emotions for ourselves. The reason for this: Spielberg doesn’t create emotional intimacy with the viewer. We may feel a basic instinct of empathy while watching the alien footage—but that’s all Spielberg gives us to work with. It comes as a great surprise that the same man who gave us E.T.—an alien whose kindness inspired us to care for him and see his humanity—gave us little grey guys that looked like they were pulled from stock images online.
Good films do not tell us how we should feel. Instead, they leave us with burning questions about ourselves, our fellow humans, and especially about what we believe. Though the box office numbers prove Spielberg still knows what he’s doing in the industry, divided audiences have us questioning if he’s relying too much on the safety of repetition.
The end of Disclosure Day asks us to listen. But to whom?
