Disclosure Day
Steven Spielberg is one of the best directors of all time. I think it is fair to say that. He can dig way down to unearth the gold nuggets of human nature, polishing and purifying, to then weave a golden thread throughout the tapestry of our mundane life. We are utterly entranced and transported by his vision for an hour or two.
So then, it is completely baffling what happened with his most recent — and, given his advancing age, one might expect to be his swan song — movie, Disclosure Day.
I really love Spielberg’s past work, and sure, I know that every director can produce a dud, but this is such a poor effort that my mind boggled. I left the theatre wondering if it was a) a huge inside joke, b) he didn’t really direct it, or c) he was forced to direct it and had purposely chosen to make it so bad that that fact would be obvious.
I’ve been searching for reasons to make sense of one of the greatest storytellers of our time making such utter tripe. It is devoid of originality, of plot. It’s full of trope. The special effects were not special, but were downright embarrassing. The acting was good, but that acting only made more obvious the lack of equally good story. It was an instantly forgettable TV movie.
This piece will likely have spoilers, so if you really want to watch the movie unhindered by knowledge my review shall reveal then you should probably stop reading here.
You know, Hollywood has a particular bent these last few decades. One that hasn’t worked well for it, overall. It’s like it has a weird obsession with, let’s say, trains. It just loves trains. Every movie that gets made by the movers and shakers of Hollywood is about trains, has trains inserted where trains would not normally be, is placed in and around trains. Trains and more trains.
Not everyone loves trains. But that doesn’t matter. They love trains. They will show you trains regardless of your preferences. It seems that no matter the story, trains will be there.
This movie is no exception. You’d think that someone of Spielberg’s stature and reputation would be able to make a movie where they didn’t get to push trains once again, but alas that was not the case.
In fact, this movie is so disjointed in so many ways, it is hard to imagine that anything less than say, a dozen people, got to have their wicked way with the creative direction and “story” before it was allowed to come into existence. I almost feel bad for it. It obviously had a traumatic birthing.
I’ll cut to the chase — and actually a major portion of this movie was just that, a chase. And not a particularly good or inventive one. Most of the escapes stretched the imagination to the extreme. For example, in one scene the male lead hid behind a fence with large holes in it, in full view of a dozen evil henchmen, and yet none looked around at any point. He then managed to steal one of their cars, driving through what should have been a shower of deadly bullets, then ram into a house… and not only survive that impact unharmed, but also the car remained fully functional, enough that it could continue to then ram through the other wall and thereafter continue on an extended chase.
That chase ended when they managed to reach a cliff, jumping out before the car goes over and then hiding behind a rock like a episode of Scooby Do. The henchmen arriving were appropriately mesmerized by the sinking car so much that they never once consider an alternative and look around in the bushes, thus allowing them to walk off, again in full view.
The henchmen — suited agents of the evil company — were obviously chosen for their skills at completely ignoring the very obvious under every circumstance, and excel at it.
And that was the rough template typical of most of the men in the entire movie. The boyfriend was a complete petulant child and only there to make the lead female appear successful by comparison. He offered no use whatsoever to anyone and one wonders why on earth a supposedly successful career woman would ever have chosen such a man-child for a partner in the first place. Perhaps as a stand-in for the children she has obviously chosen to not have.
While the boyfriend was a dud, the male lead was allowed to have at least a modicum of agency — a geeky fellow who wanted to share the alien information regardless of the huge worldwide damage it might cause, because one of the videos had shown an alien supposedly being mistreated. How very Silicon Valley. Anyone else tired of tech bros forcing their immature and ill-conceived decisions on us?
While it is made clear that we humans are obviously evil and terribly inconsiderate to the poor captured aliens, there was no mention of the numerous examples of us poor humans being abducted against our will and poked and prodded by those very same aliens over the last hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. What about all that horrendous torture inflicted on mankind and various farm animals?
But that was the theme — aliens are apparently just all good and we should learn from them. The horrendous and bizarre animal mutilations that are well-documented, or the abductions and terrorization of humans do not matter to Spielberg.
No, indeed, we are supposed to learn to have empathy from them. The gift given to the lead female was the ability to see into the hearts and minds of people around her.
Her first use of it was to get out of paying for a speeding ticket. That was a good example of using an amazing gift such as that, wasn’t it? In fact, she continued to use the empathy gift to con people all the way throughout, only occasionally dropping information on people who she felt would benefit. And of course, those same people all queued up in the studio later, for some reason, to tell her how wonderful her insight had been — just so you understand that, even though the gift wasn’t actually used well at all, it really was actually useful to know everyone’s secrets in that manner.
The truth of knowing everyone’s secrets — in reality — would be an horrible gift. People typically vacillate from strong feelings to more mature feelings throughout the day on various subject. We process feelings over time. This is why one never reads someone else’s private journals — you aren’t getting the mature version, you’re likely getting the raw emotional in-the-moment stuff. If in fact, we all had the ability to so invasively read other’s minds without their permission — as she did throughout the movie — then we’d likely get a lot of unprocessed emotion and thus make all manner of mistakes as a result.
If she were to read my mind at any point during the day she might be inclined to call the police. I suspect that to be true of most, if not all.
It appears society’s naïve child-like hope is that, if only people could share themselves utterly and completely, then we’d all be fully understood and be forever safe and happy. Unfortunately, that’s a complete misunderstanding of what it is to be human and the general function of emotion as a carrier of the process of decision-making. Perhaps a better gift would have been if she had gained the ability to see inward and understand her own emotions rather than those of others around her. Maybe then she’d realize she was being invasive, abusive and irresponsible, and act like a respectful adult instead.
We are supposed to feel bad for the alien who was treated poorly by the bad human. We are supposed to think everyone having mind-reading empathy is good and that we should all just listen — as though simply listening actually meant understanding and accepting. Feels more than a little preachy. Feels like a boomer telling younger generations how to behave — and in ways that they probably didn’t at the same age.
No matter that the two main characters were abducted from their childhood bedrooms by aliens pretending to be innocent forest animals, only to be taken to a Hansel and Gretel house — the spacecraft. Because nothing says “safe” like Hansel and Gretel and forest creatures acting insane. Those two children were then leaned over by the then fully uncloaked aliens and operated on. Because, again, who doesn’t like to be operated on while they are still awake. But that’s not bad. Forcing terrified screaming children onto operating tables is such a great start to an equal relationship between humans and aliens.
And in the end, it is the mainstream media — always the bastion of truth and moral character — who saves us by putting out the proof of alien videos to all their dozens of viewers. Really, don’t you know that podcasts have more audience reach than any of the top new broadcasts? Mainstream news is dead. Only boomers are still watching it.
And the final cherry on the top of all that, is the actual in-person grand appearance of the alien presumably from the video who had been prodded by the evil humans. Just so you know he made it. He lives in a weird claustrophobic pod on a wheelchair now, because — well, we don’t know because we aren’t given any information about the very thing we came to see.
In the end there’s no actual disclosure in Disclosure Day. We don’t get to know anything about UFOs or aliens that we don’t already know. Spielberg did the same thing in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Brought the aliens in for a closer look and then dropped us, as though that’s it folks, nothing more to see here.
But of course, that’s just the start of the story. That’s where it actually gets interesting — and challenging.
Challenging in a way that Hollywood isn’t prepared to handle. Challenging in ways that aren’t simple and easily fit their narratives of everyone loving everyone else and all is well.
Because the truth is that when one civilization meets another — and one is far more advanced — there is a power imbalance that is problematic to say the least. Aliens arriving would be a major upheaval. They would be so far in advance of us technologically speaking, that they could share very little of that knowledge without causing huge problems for our immature society. For example, any advanced form of energy creation would come with the very real risk that that tech would be used to create weapons. Humans can barely handle nuclear power and even then we have exploded bombs all over the planet and killed hundreds of thousands of people.
No, aliens would be forced into being our overlords and us becoming a subservient group. It would not — could not — be equal. And with such massive inequality as the basis for our relationship with them there would inevitably be all the usual manipulations and drama on the human side that occurs when one human feels lesser to another.
I’m fairly certain that aliens are already aware of these likely implications, having studied humans for some time, and are not about to arrive on the Whitehouse lawn anytime soon.
In fact, the most sensible approach on their part would be to slowly drip-feed us humans their advanced alien tech until we reach required maturity in using that tech, with all the safeguards in place. Eventually, we’d reach the same level as the aliens, and a true relationship could be established. And there’s quite a bit of evidence that supports that having already occurred, with the revelation that many of the alien craft we have in our possession was gifted to us rather than crashed, and alien tech has been given to companies for research and development outside of the the reaches of FOIA requests.
We have recently been told that, in reality, there are at least four different alien species, and not all have the same goals. The movie didn’t address that either. Nope. Just one type — the good, loving type. The type of alien that is so advanced that fancy apes on a planet can actually somehow capture and even torture them. The kind that we need to feel sorry for. Because we humans are bad and need to change.
It’s funny how there’s such a movement in the West for people to just be accepted for who they really are, but that doesn’t apply to humans overall. Individuals can be good, but humans as a race, as a civilization, always bad.
The West is currently struggling with the concept of individual freedom and the need for group constraints. We all want to have complete freedom to be who we truly are, and yet, that freedom allows far too much variation of judgement and acceptance of others for many to accept. Freedom to be you might include complete lack of acceptance of another, with all the issues that brings. The Liberals think Conservatives are insane for thinking as they do, and the Conservatives think Liberals insane in exactly the same way. Each side unwilling or unable to accept that they might be wrong, even though logic dictates it.
Aliens watching would quickly conclude that these animals are no capable of accepting yet another way of thinking that is different. If I were an alien, I’d spend my time making sure humans didn’t leave the planet. We are, no doubt, a cosmic embarrassment.
Conflict is built into our system. Civilization is the salve we use to smooth over that conflict. Our social norms ease the discomfort of us all having the freedom to judge others.
The very human idea that aliens are going to arrive and suddenly make all that work better would be to imagine that aliens will arrive and probe each and every one of us until we “work” the way they want us to. Being human results in what we have. To be better, we’d need to be alien. That doesn’t sound very much like freedom at all. No, it wouldn’t be much different from us breeding so-called negative traits out of dogs we like.
Here’s an idea; how about them aliens arrive and simply accept us for who we really are — warts and all? How about no probing whatsoever? How about we keep the empathy we already have and are used to? In fact, why do aliens ever need to come here at all? Maybe the status quo here on earth is just fine? If they want to play a part then how about just stop us from blowing the planet up and then keep out of our way. That works. I don’t think we need to be specially selected by aliens, as Spielberg seems to think, to make an advanced human. Wouldn’t it be much more empathetic of the aliens to love us, as-is?
These days, I’m not a big fan of the idea of disclosure, actually. I think it most certainly would bring problems and we can only guess at any benefits that might be conveyed to humanity. I don’t need to see or meet aliens. Even benevolent ones.
I am curious, of course. I’m curious about volcanoes too. No desire to get near one.
I don’t know what Spielberg was aiming for with this movie. Maybe it’s his age. He’s an aging boomer, so there’s that. Maybe he just wanted to push humanity towards a more empathetic state, wants us all to listen more. Sure. We can do that. We don’t need aliens to teach us how to feel. Besides, they don’t seem like they do a lot of laughing or crying. I’m not sure what they are doing with all the emotion they supposedly have deep down.
Who knows, maybe they harvest it from us? Wouldn’t that have been a nice twist for the end of the movie? After teaching everyone to be be fully empathetic and emotionally free, we discover that they feed off our emotion?
No, not original, of course, but then again, this movie was never about originality.