Review: Disclosure Day (Patreon)

Four years after making his magnum opus, Spielberg has returned to apparently familiar ground. Disclosure Day is strikingly retro: a properly Spielbergian adventure story about extra-terrestrials serving as ambassadors for a universe that's warm and benevolent if human beings can get past the threat aliens present to anthropocentrism. There's plenty of Cold War nostalgia here; structurally we're not too far off from The Day the Earth Stood Still, and there's an ambient threat of Armageddon in the background in the shape of Kim Jong Un.

That detail seems interesting, so let's focus on it. The presence of Kim Jong Un dates this curiously; the threat of the DPRK is more a bogeyman of the first Trump presidency than the Iran-obsessed current administration. I think this incongruity is intentional; time is out of joint throughout Disclosure Day. The internal history of the film touches on a number of moments in American history involving government secrecy: Watergate, Roswell, Abu Ghraib, the global surveillance disclosures. This is not a film of one moment; it's a movie built on years and years of history.

Spielberg's own history is particularly relevant here. Disclosure Day is redolent of several Spielberg pictures, particularly Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Minority Report, and Munich, films that express intense skepticism of surveillance and secret police. The film wears its themes on its sleeve — it's literally called Disclosure Day. The film wrestles with transparency in the characters' relationships and as a matter of government policy. Its protagonist is a journalist. The first two acts are a Seventies paranoid thriller, with characters on the run from a shadowy force (a private company, curiously, rather than the surveillance state itself). David Koepp's script is built on incremental revelations, with each piece of information creating a new mystery, building up to a surprisingly ambiguous denouement. The third act reveals the film has been a Spielberg picture under the hood this whole time. Some folks find this frustrating, but honestly, if Spielberg is secure enough in himself to return to his stomping grounds without fear of appearing saccharine, he has officially established himself as one of American cinema's masters. Your enjoyment of Disclosure Day may live or die based on how much you like Spielberg's ethos of a fundamentally warm universe (and his excessive deference to the American press). I'm sympathetic to it, and I had a damn fine time.