With ‘Disclosure Day,’ Steven Spielberg Gives His Successors a Run For Their Money
This story contains minor spoilers for Disclosure Day.
There are several master American filmmakers, absolute titans of the form, who have now reached a point where every time they announce a new movie, I feel at least a twinge of curiosity as to how it might play as their final work. I don’t say this to be morbid—I truly wish these figures a Clint Eastwood-length career, with an Eastwood-like number of elegiac farewells—but rather to steel myself, however slightly, for the inevitability that one day, for any number of reasons but likely all the same one, Martin Scorsese will stop making movies. Michael Mann will stop making movies. David Cronenberg will stop making movies. Steven Spielberg, somehow, will stop making movies.
All of these directors have lately made films that could be interpreted as final statements, even if in most cases, they’re likely to keep working. And of this bunch, Spielberg seems the least oriented toward finality; most of his movies are too fast, too busy moving, for elegy. Even when they consist largely of people in a room talking, watching the blocking fall into place is exciting, and the camerawork comes alive with electrified precision. It’s not just that Spielberg doesn’t automatically “see the proscenium arch,” as Alfred Hitchcock famously noted after watching Jaws; it’s that he doesn’t seem capable of imposing one. So it’s no surprise that Spielberg’s new film Disclosure Day hasn’t been discussed much in terms of finality but as quite the opposite: a nearly 80-year-old director getting back in the summer-movie game. It’s been a decade since he had a movie out in the warm-weather moviegoing season that Jaws basically invented (and when he did, it was 2016’s The BFG, one of his most charmingly pokey fantasies), and now here is Disclosure Day, an alien-themed thriller claiming almost the exact same release date as Jurassic Park and E.T. did on their respective ways to becoming the biggest movie ever.
Disclosure Day will almost certainly not be the biggest movie ever. It will probably not make more money than Obsession, the indie-horror sensation of the moment and maybe, by now, of all time. The theoretical idea behind Spielberg coming up with an original story, giving it to ace journeyman David Koepp, directing it in full spectacular-camera-movements form, and gamely participating in the 2026 promotional-rounds gauntlet, might be to prove that he can keep pace with the Nolans and the YouTubers of the world. But do audiences even respond en masse to the kind of pure skill and craftsmanship Spielberg brings to a strange, surprisingly spiritual movie like this one? (They sure didn’t when presented with his masterful retelling of West Side Story.) Even savvier viewers have been trained to look for replicable, manual-conforming versions of a “good story,” so often distinctive from great filmmaking.
Disclosure Day does seem to take a few cues from the filmmakers its director has influenced—or, just as likely, those influences are simply becoming even more apparent as the younger filmmakers’ careers press onward. Still, I admit there’s a touch of J.J. Abrams to the in-media-res opening of Spielberg’s latest, which joins Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) in the process of a covert handoff, trading a backpack full of techie devices for the return of his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson). He pulls an unusual weapon and the couple manages to abscond together with their MacGuffin intact, perpetuating a chase that started before the movie began and continues for much of its runtime, with Daniel’s ex-boss Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) leading the pursuit.
Meanwhile, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), the weather correspondent for a Kansas City TV station, finds herself drawn in Daniel’s direction, and involuntarily exhibiting some eerie powers. When a cop pulls her over for speeding, she pinpoints the domestic source of his bad mood, rattles off some heartfelt advice, and informs him that he’ll be letting her go. Later, she clouds men’s (and women’s) minds with illusion, like The Shadow. Eventually, Daniel and Margaret meet and figure out their connection, which has to do with the files he’s carrying. Those files, you learn early on, confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life. Daniel is part of an organization that means to disseminate this information freely, while Scanlon’s private company strenuously objects, believing it will cause widespread chaos. Daniel wonders if it maybe could heal the world, rather than destroying its faith.
