Even Steven
Disclosure Day finds the great director once again staging close encounters with interstellar visitors — and crafting a conspiracy thriller that doubles as a career retrospective
We are not alone in the universe — Steven Spielberg has been telling us this for years. Aliens are among us. Sometimes they hide in our closets, looking like adorable geriatrics with glowing fingers (E.T.). Other times, they swoop down to our terra firma on mother ships, inspiring us to contemplate life, the universe, and everything in between while playing with our mashed potatoes (Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Spielberg has warned us to watch the skies, lest these visitors try to recruit us for human zoos (Firelight, a sci-fi movie that the 17-year-old Spielberg made in 1964) or eradicate us entirely (War of the Worlds). He’s taught us to look for them in every nook and cranny of modern-day living, even if our memory of them is eventually erased by Will Smith (the Men in Black movies, which Spielberg has been an executive producer on since Day One).
Now one of the great American pop moviemakers of the past 50 years has once again returned to the subject of little green men, in a format he virtually pioneered five decades ago: the prestige blockbuster. Disclosure Day takes for granted that a) extraterrestrials do exist; and b) the government is lying to you about them. Each of these concepts is considered a given and carries the same weight here, as well as the notions that whistleblowers are one of the last great defenders of democracy and that the powers of the state will be used to silence those who attempt to speak out. On paper, his latest reads like a 1970s paranoid potboiler. Onscreen, it looks a 1990s summer movie, all big-swing sheen. In reality, this woozy attempt to ride a wave of distrust and lack of faith in our authority figures couldn’t feel more of its moment. This time, the men in black are the bad guys. Remember when Spielberg digitally replaced the guns in the hands of government agents for the 20th anniversary of E.T., then expressed regret about the decision? Imagine that he not only restored the weapons but crafted an entire two-and-a-half-hour feature around that one sequence as a mea culpa. That’s Disclosure Day.
