The problem with Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day? It just isn’t very good. Now, it is a Spielberg movie, and there are things to like about it: the lighting, the special effects, the action set pieces. The technical elements, in other words. Because Spielberg has always been a great technical filmmaker.
That’s not to knock the action-movie elements. Those work fine. What doesn’t work is that this is one of those movies where Spielberg is indulging his intellectual pretensions. Or, rather, the intellectual pretensions he believes a man of his stature ought to have. And it could be, as some have theorized over the decades, that Spielberg is a certain sort of idiot savant: that he lives entirely in his own head, without much of what lies beyond his head ever making its way in.
Disclosure Day lends fresh support to this hypothesis. The story of a committed team of whistleblowers who finally reveal that the U.S. government has been hiding encounters with intelligent life beyond the stars, it’s being billed as a spiritual successor to Spielberg’s 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And it arrives in your local metroplex with exquisite timing: just as members of Congress are talking about alien bodies and secret UFO retrieval programs and the Trump administration is releasing gossipy documents and blurry videos. We can’t say definitively that any of this footage shows anything extraterrestrial, but some of it’s been interesting nonetheless.
