Disclosure Day, by Steven Spielberg, isn’t quite what one expects it to be after listening to all the early hype. Yes, it’s a welcome return by the master storyteller to the genre that he defined—and that defined him—with films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and later War of the Worlds. It’s also a return to the kind of fun action-adventure, imaginative chase sequences, and thrilling set pieces we haven’t seen from him since the original Indiana Jones trilogy, or even E.T.
But even though Spielberg clearly has a lot of fun creating tense situations and caricatured bad guys pressuring the heroes to the music of John Williams, he’s somewhat lost touch with modern audiences’ sensibilities, how they view alien lore after decades of science fiction on screen and countless hoaxes exposed online every day, and how mass communication works in the era of social media and on-demand video consumption.
Furthermore, Spielberg was never known as a screenwriter, and here he takes story credit for one that isn’t high-concept but rather clichéd, leaving David Koepp—who has written some bad mumbo jumbo for him before—to write forty-something drafts of a screenplay that, for much of its running time, doesn’t really make sense, relies on a hell of a lot of exposition, and doesn’t lead anywhere particularly fulfilling in the end.
And finally, from the man who defined what aliens looked like for decades, you’d expect a more original concept than a rehash of conspiracy theories we’ve moved beyond since The X-Files originally went off the air some 25 years ago. Contact and Arrival were both masterful in portraying what an existential first encounter with extraterrestrial life might look and feel like. This film seems, at best, derivative of all that—or simply an excuse for some fun action sequences.
On the plus side, its message about empathy in a world full of hate is significant, as is the feeling one gets from the final moments, if you can get past the reality check of how the world behaves these days. The cinematography and John Williams’ score are wonderfully evocative of earlier Spielbergian movie magic, which is rare in cinema today and always comforting to revisit.
A worthy effort, nonetheless.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/SCYT8vb2siQ
