Flasz On Film

Old men rarely make great movies, at least the kinds of great movies that they used to make when their blood ran hotter. It is natural to expect that a filmmaker coming to an end of an illustrious career peppered generously with works held by many as masterpieces to spend their latter years reflecting and looking holistically at the subjects, themes and emotions that compelled them to make movies in the first place.

Therefore, it is theoretically fitting for Steven Spielberg—who is turning eighty this year—to use the gift of experience of having lived on this planet for longer than most as a filter through which to observe his own passions, proclivities and personal drives. He used The Fabelmans to examine his own biography and wrestle with personal demons in addition to highlighting his lifelong relationship with the sense of wonder inherent to the art of making static images come alive by projecting them onto a white sheet, twenty-four each second. And now with Disclosure Day it looks as though Spielberg intended to look back at another one of his pet interests he has revisited in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.—The Extra Terrestrial, War of the Worlds, and even the unfairly maligned Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull—the yet-unanswered question whether we are alone in the universe.

Only it’s not that simple.

Spielberg’s new film, written by his frequent collaborator David Koepp (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, Kingdom of Crystal Skull)—is quite unfortunate because it looks as though it wanted to serve as a piece at the uniquely Spielbergian intersection between the cerebral and the sentimental while it also wants to function like the kinds of spectacularly bombastic blockbusters Spielberg used to make a long time ago. In short, it’s a movie that can’t make up its mind as to its own identity and in return serves the viewer a whole lot of cacophonous noise that teases great things while delivering exasperation and disappointment across the board.

Somewhere in this engineered to the n-th degree slice of eye candy about a man (Josh O’Connor) running away from a shady government agency as he’s trying to find a way to disclose their mind-shattering secrets, and a weather presenter (Emily Blunt) who begins to experience telepathic episodes, there’s a story that Spielberg and Koepp cared about telling. One that Spielberg in particular felt he was equipped to deliver on because of his long-standing association with the genre and his particular knack for building action set pieces that many other filmmakers simply didn’t have the optics, gumption or bravura to reduce to practice in a way that makes viewers’ jaws drop to the floor. Also, one that the same Spielberg was theoretically best positioned to respond to on the level of pure emotion and its evocation using the camera as a sophisticated tool of communicating complex messages to audiences.

But something tells me that what ended up captured on film were two films shot simultaneously and siloed away from one another, neither of which able to deliver on its primary mission: one to entertain and astonish, and the other to mesmerize. And it’s not as though it wasn’t possible in theory. I believe it was… but maybe twenty or thirty years ago when Spielberg had the required energy to emulsify these two seemingly immiscible substances.

Thus, what Disclosure Day ended up being was unfocused and distracted as opposed to precise and inspired. It’s a film that circles a conversation the filmmaker clearly wanted to have with his audiences—one about the need to step away from the brink and appreciate the wonder of the universe—without ever committing to actually having it outright. We are so distracted with plot and rushed from A to B to C and D by the relentless flywheel of Spielberg-esque domino-style set piece engineering that most of those moments where we could reflect on the questions the script clearly wanted us to internalize just fly by unnoticed, or at best barely paid attention to. Similarly, we never get to indulge in that set piece magic fully either because Spielberg instinctively feels he needs to rush through those action sequences to places where he could ruminate on those cerebral ideas the film wants to interrogate.

And so we flip-flop. We go through escapist sequences where cars drive through walls and where the camera follows our guy in unbroken takes reminiscent of War of the Worlds and Saving Private Ryan while a good chunk of the visual language relies heavily on playing with reflections only to brake abruptly and have Colin Firth, Colman Domingo and others recite conveniently placed expository dialogue at speeds that would make Eminem feel threatened. And then we’re back to set pieces and Spielberg reliving his childhood again by engineering what clearly functions as his love letter to Cecil B. DeMille’s train sequence in The Greatest Show on Earth. Imagine watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind using your left eye while trying to watch War of the Worlds with your right eye. It’s just not a good idea for anything more than a headache… which is what Disclosure Day amounts to.

Without a doubt, this movie was supposed to work as a coda to a career spent at the intersection between blood-curdling spectacle and inspired myth-making, but it just doesn’t have the right ingredients to make it happen. Oil and water won’t mix on their own and no amount of well-intentioned effort is going to change that. In order for them to form a cohesive substance you need (1) a magical ingredient known as an emulsifier and (2) enough elbow grease to whip them together.

I’m sorry but Disclosure Day just doesn’t have it. With the right temperament, balance and a touch of that Spielbergian greatness that has been expended over the years and decades behind the camera this could have been the modern-day successor to James Cameron’s The Abyss, which successfully navigated the narrow passage between emotional honesty and spectacular wonder. Instead, it registers as distracted and indulgent; an incredibly expensive movie intended to function as an ersatz M. Night Shyamalan which has the ambition of both but the intimacy of neither.