In the run-up to the release of Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day,” I felt a whiff of desperation in the air. The director, who is seventy-nine, had had two commercial flops in a row, “West Side Story” and “The Fabelmans.” He must have been beginning to wonder whether, if the new film proved to be another failure, he would still be able to command the ample budgets that his spectacular adventures require. After seeing the trailer for “Disclosure Day,” which advertised an alien-arrival story, I figured that Spielberg would be returning to familiar turf and serving up a crowd-pleasing intergalactic meatball. Instead, he bet big on a fundamental value that’s all the more crucial for being too rare in blockbusters: directorial delight. With “Disclosure Day,” he has delivered something akin to Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman”: just as Scorsese’s mighty latter-year Mob drama is no mere retread of his earlier gangland forays but a comprehensive revision of them, so does Spielberg’s project boldly reconfigures outer-space tropes, and not just his own. The movie thrums with his excitement in bringing his own new perspective to the screen, and with the audiovisual verve that doing so inspired in him.
There’s an intrinsic pleasure in seeing filmmakers grow both older and weirder, yielding to their personal idiosyncrasies and obsessions, taking wild chances in pursuit of their passions. Spielberg’s vision in “Disclosure Day” suggests audacity, even recklessness, two qualities that have often been wanting in his movies. There’s a sense of freedom, of a work pulled from deep within, that in some ways seems even more personal than the memoir-like “The Fabelmans.” This is one of the few films that Spielberg seems to have made without quite knowing what it would look like or how it would turn out. It contains a tangle of conflicting subplots and strange situations, somehow squeezed into a story that’s just coherent enough. There are some defects—including instances of garish taste, vain virtuosity, and a modicum of commercial calculation—but they don’t dispel the over-all sense of urgency and wonder.
This thriller-like story soon opens a new dimension with the introduction of Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a TV meteorologist in Kansas City, Missouri. One morning, a cardinal flies through the window of the apartment she shares with her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), and suddenly Margaret starts speaking Russian without realizing it. Just as suddenly, she has gained another strange power: stopped by a police officer for speeding, she looks him in the eye and reads his mind, stupefying him with talk of intimate secrets involving his wife. (Needless to say, she doesn’t get a ticket.) While on the air that morning, she interrupts her weather report with a seemingly incoherent skein of clicks and clucks; then she collapses. She’s taken to a hospital, where, outside the exam room, officials claiming to be from the F.B.I. are waiting for her. She looks one in the eye and realizes that they’re not from the government—she, too, is being hunted by WARDEX—and she drags Jackson out on a backdoor escape. In a car, as they make their getaway, she gets a call from Hugo ordering her to join up with Daniel. There’s something connecting Margaret and Daniel that, in Hugo’s mind, is as important as the disclosure of the alien files. Their connection turns out to be a mystery deeply woven into the fabric of the story, and its eventual revelation is so dramatic that it renders the alien disclosure itself nearly anticlimactic.
“Disclosure Day” is unusual in this regard: it’s an extremely back-loaded film, in which the preordained happy ending—the success of the heroes, and the triumph over evil—takes surprising forms that surpass and expand the premise. Still, there’s plenty of extraordinary plotting early on, too, that foregrounds the strangeness of the heroes’ journeys. For instance, when Daniel and Jane go on the run, she chooses their initial hideout, a convent where, she reveals, she was once a novitiate. She has renounced her vows but not her faith, and at their next hideout, when Daniel explains his plan to disclose the files, she’s appalled: she thinks that many people, learning of extraterrestrials, “will stop believing in God” and start worshipping the aliens instead. Her faith soon becomes a principled bulwark, as, in an extraordinary twist (spoilers ahead), Noah uses one of the aliens’ sticklike devices as a jerry-rigged mind-control system, to attempt to turn Jane against Daniel. Noah conjures, in Jane’s mind, his own physical presence across a table from her, and he forces her to answer questions about Daniel. The scene plays like a meditation on torture and freedom, and on faith as a form of resistance in the face of seemingly absolute power.
Where Jane embodies the power of religious belief, Margaret is the incarnation of empathy: her mind-reading powers make her instantly aware of others’ emotional needs and desires. Not unlike Noah with his stick, she can also control the thoughts of others, using her presence to conjure their mental images of people of importance to them, alive or dead. Margaret deploys this power to find Daniel and to free him from Noah and the WARDEX minions—essentially, by stunning them emotionally. I watched in open-mouthed awe the scenes of these ruses. There is no technological wizardry involved, only a simple but mighty effect of film editing that could have been pulled off in the early silent era: the power of montage, a basic and defining element of movies. Coming from Spielberg, these scenes come across as a strange and mysterious form of self-interrogation. Margaret may be a supernaturally powerful empath, but she also suggests the looming possibilities of weaponized empathy: demagogy at a one-on-one level.
Margaret is entirely aware of what she’s doing when she pulls off these empathetic maneuvers, but she remains oblivious to how she herself is being puppeteered—when she speaks Russian or Korean, when she clucks. There’s a link between these conscious and unconscious forms of mind control, and for Spielberg Margaret’s eventual coming to consciousness is a matter of fundamental morality. It’s also a self-regarding, self-challenging portrayal of his own art of moviemaking.
The workspace from which Hugo runs the liberation group bears a peculiar resemblance to a movie studio. The space is big, bare, and hangar-like, filled not with secret agents glued to monitors but with craftspeople putting up frames and walls for what looks like a set where a fictional scene would be filmed; Hugo indeed calls it a “staging area.” Throughout “Disclosure Day,” every glimpse of the workspace reveals that set in a more advanced state of construction, until its point is finally revealed: Margaret is brought, for a sort of regression, to visit a perfectly detailed replica of her childhood home—where, at the age of ten, she was, not to put too fine a point on it, captured by aliens. She has no memories from before that event, and she’s filled in the blank with guilt and regret. Her psychodramatic home tour is meant to restore her childhood to her—in other words, to restore her to herself.
This conceit highlights the essential difference between Margaret’s powers and Daniel’s. Where she deals in feelings, he is a numbers guy—the noises that Margaret makes on TV are as clear as English to him, because he recognizes the sounds as eight-bit code. He is the master of the plot, the bearer of the backpack, the metteur en scène of the film’s titular disclosure day. Yet he’s unable to put his script into action without the aid of Margaret, the player of multiple roles, the master of guises—in movie terms, the actress, who is drastically transformed into characters radically different from herself and who, in turn, touches her spectators in the most vulnerable recesses of their souls. In Spielberg’s vision, Margaret is the performer who is required to give of herself, indeed too much of herself, for the needs of the overarching plot and the common good. It’s her vulnerability that, ethically, matters most.
The scene of Margaret’s self-confrontation is an extraordinary combination of exaltation and kitsch. Spielberg himself is palpably in the grip of its overwhelming emotional power, its combination of metaphysics and theatre. But he builds Margaret’s operatic transfiguration on a core of suburban sentimentality, and at times the schmaltz wins out. It reminded me of something I’ve long felt about Spielberg’s work, which is that his storytelling tends toward the cultural average, with representative types whose individuation is subordinated to the backstory-light and digression-free speed of his action. Sentimentality is approximation; Margaret’s regression slips “Disclosure Day” back into Spielberg’s comfort zone of a generic, all-too-familiar pop-culture past.
There’s nonetheless a critical tweak built into the scene involving the uses of childhood sentimentality, and here, again, Spielberg suggests a self-awareness of the dangers of his practice, and the essential importance of having a virtuous idea system at the heart of such a drama. Margaret has effectively been the victim of a childhood trauma, albeit one that was ostensibly inflicted morally, for the planned benefit of all humanity. In Spielberg’s democratic vision, the benefit of humanity at large is impossible without the redemption of its victim zero. (The notion brings to mind a colossal precursor: the cosmic redemption of a woman named Margaret, in Goethe’s “Faust.”)
As astonishing as much of the movie is, it’s padded with sequences that seem contrived to sell its extravagant conceits. There’s even one high-stress scene, involving a train and a car (as in the primal scene from “The Fabelmans”), that plays the same role as the hilly chase in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another”: to make a movie of emphatic ideological orientation play like an action film. A far more satisfying action scene takes place when Margaret, after the regression, finds a new form of principled power, laying a hand on one of the mighty sticklike devices and leading Hugo’s group in battle—now, with consciousness restored, doing so fully as herself. The resulting action makes delicious use of special effects to conjure a classic cinematic trope—invisibility—in a spectacular new form.
Margaret’s leadership also makes possible the movie’s titular dénouement, the revelation of the footage that will offer the world proof of the presence of alien life. Spielberg has said that he has become certain of the existence of aliens, and that conviction marks the fundamental difference in tone between this new film and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” which never seems like anything but a vigorously developed fantasy. “Disclosure Day” has the overheated and hectic fervor of an ideological movie, like King Vidor’s 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”—which is why, in the realm of filmmakers’ later-career movies, it also resembles Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating, self-financed superproduction “Megalopolis,” from 2024. Ideology drives the story doubly as Jane overcomes her opposition to the disclosure after a cleverly scripted consultation with the convent’s Mother Superior (Elizabeth Marvel), who justifies alien presence via Biblical interpretation. (I was reminded of the venerable quip that classic-era Hollywood amounted to Jewish producers selling Catholic doctrine to Protestant audiences—and of the joke’s earnest artistic implications.)
For Spielberg, the long-delayed public revelation of alien life on Earth involves another personal ideal, his own version of cinematic utopia: the entire world watching the same thing at the same time. With the footage-within-a-film at the end of “Disclosure Day,” essentially a faux documentary of aliens, he dramatizes the world-commanding control of eyeballs. The vaunted ability of mass media to unify the globe here comes off as a benevolent form of tyranny, of a consensual unanimity in which the bearer of truth gains total attention, total acceptance, and total gratitude. Here, the director’s mask of benevolence, however sincere, feels thinner and more transparent than ever. “Disclosure Day” is ultimately a wild and wondrous fantasy of the will to power. The last word in the movie is, tellingly, the one with which parents admonish and command children: “Listen.” ♦
