Steven Spielberg’s aliens are the ones who plant something in your mind. Such is his desire for contact and deep communion with an alien life form that his alien films (excluding War of the Worlds, which is based on a novel) always depict them communicating through nonverbal, immediate means. The aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind implant the image of a mountain in people’s minds and learn to communicate through music. E.T. forms a symbiotic bond with Elliot, and the two suffer together. The aliens in the finale of A.I. enter the mind of the robot protagonist, altering the reality around him.
In Disclosure Day, the aliens have done something to a man who works in cybersecurity and a woman who announces the weather on a local TV station. He has a talent for mathematics—a form of nonverbal communication—and understands their messages; she suddenly enters people’s minds, understands them, and through empathy can establish contact with them. It’s unclear what purpose this serves, why it happened, and those directly involved are more frightened than anything else. Certainly, one of them has highly classified information they want to make public, and a group of people wants to stop them.
For a long time, we know nothing more than this; one of the most beautiful things about Disclosure Day is that it seems to begin in medias res, as if there were an entire preceding section we’ve missed, and—like the characters—we must piece it together, figure out who these people are, what they’re doing, and, indeed, what we’re even talking about. Guessing, understanding, and piecing together the information without any explanation but with a thousand small clues—often purely visual—is a pleasure. Because this is a film about people who want to reveal information, which in turn builds its narrative on artfully, slowly, and with noticeable reluctance, revealing its plot details. A film about discovery.
The story, once fully understood, is very classic; it is a Spielberg film in every sense, with villains who lack strong motivations but are dressed in black (which isn’t the best). What makes the difference is the film’s craftsmanship—that is, how it is told—the sense of action, tension, and above all, awe and wonder regarding what we do not know. This is also why it’s not hard for many to dismiss Disclosure Day: it has very high ambitions and pairs its sci-fi speculation with a religious discourse (if aliens really existed, what place would there be for God?), a discussion of war, and a boundless optimism that may turn some people off but is actually the most impressive part of the whole project.
In Disclosure Day, in fact, there is something that is extremely rare to find in films and that is perhaps Spielberg’s greatest gift to cinema: a naivety that is never childish or synonymous with stupidity, but is, on the contrary, very mature. All of his films are a celebration of allowing oneself to be amazed, of wanting to watch something in order to be awestruck by it; this one, in particular, is a very complex film, yet one for simple hearts. Here, the protagonists try to release videos because the world has the right to see and be stunned. For someone like Spielberg, who has this level of faith in cinema and in images, seeing something (especially a video) is the best way to understand more. Being amazed as a form of knowledge, but even more so, asserting the right to be amazed by the video.
In the background of it all is what is eventually described as “the most serious crisis since the Cuban Missile Crisis”—something vague (this isn’t explained either) that has to do with North Korea. The world is in turmoil, supermarkets are being looted, and the news is full of reports on the matter. Amid this once-in-a-lifetime crisis, another, even bigger one emerges—because it involves aliens. For Spielberg, the answer to all the chaos we’re experiencing is to look beyond the world, to seek something that inspires us to be better. That’s the level of naivety. But the beauty of Disclosure Day lies in how deeply it draws you into that naivety.
In fact, any other movie with this kind of plot—involving conspiracies, information the government doesn’t want to reveal, and secrets that need to be made available to everyone—would end with the conclusion of that storyline, at the moment when the protagonists succeed or fail to reveal the truth, leaving the consequences only to be imagined. Disclosure Day, on the other hand, has a completely different goal: to witness what happens next, in a finale that is the best part of the film, full of mystery, engagement, wonder, and a desire to dare and imagine. And that is precisely what makes it great—not being afraid to imagine.
