Steven Spielberg’s big new UFO movie, Disclosure Day, contains a couple of minutes at the beginning in which a few characters steal files containing all the records, written and video-recorded, of the government’s cover-up of aliens since the 1947 Roswell crash, planning to release them all to the eyes of a waiting world.
The movie contains a couple of minutes at the end in which the very predictable and by now familiar-seeming files—Roswell crash, captive grays, Kecksburg crash, not much that’s new—are beheld by an awed world of TV viewers with help from an oddly uncharismatic and annoyingly stammering news anchor. Her lines are approximately: “There are no words… What you’re seeing here is… This is… I am at a loss…” and she goes on like that for a seeming eternity. The world apparently accepts all this at face value and as the film ends waits unskeptically to hear the aliens’ message to humanity, which surely will be wise and beneficent because they’re aliens.
In between those banal first few minutes and banal final few minutes, there are two-and-a-half hours of very conventional chase scenes, since a private military contractor doesn’t want disclosure files disrupting the world (though the obligatory nun character is unfazed by the prospect of alien life, in a brief, boring, harmless subplot). There’s even a scene of our two main characters being shot at by one of the anti-disclosure agents while trying desperately to leap onto a fast-moving passenger train that crashed into their car. It’s at this point that one should recall this film was written by David Koepp, the frequent Spielberg collaborator responsible for the trainwreck that was Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Along the way, the film alludes for a few fleeting, frustrating moments to genuinely interesting bits of UFO lore without really exploring or expanding upon them. For instance, the movie tells us the aliens sometimes appear to humans as common animals, but if you were expecting some deeper message about the commonality or common origin or even alien origin of all life, you won’t get it. And you certainly won’t get some complex meditation upon Native-American shapeshifter lore, werewolves, or Whitley Strieber-style “screen memories” of big-eyed giant owls. Nope, the aliens here just appear as familiar animals to keep us calm.
The behavior of the humans in the movie, even the good guys fighting for UFO disclosure, is comparably deceptive. Near the end of the movie, around the time a truly cookie-cutter film would’ve had the main character, played by Emily Blunt, go back to her psychological roots in childhood trauma via mere memory or flashback, this film shows the UFO disclosure team build an entire life-size replica of her childhood home on a big soundstage they’ve apparently commandeered in their ample spare time when not on the run from gun-toting federal/private goons. There has to have been an easier way.
Did the fake house even spur any more memories than she would’ve experienced from just thinking real hard? I don’t remember, likely because my own fragile memories were soon buried by another traumatic car chase.
I complain about David Koepp, but why should we spare Spielberg himself from blame for this banal but loud-and-shiny film-industry excretion? Isn’t virtually everything the overrated Spielberg does banal yet loud-and-shiny, like the eye-popping revelation-with-a-glow moments in nearly all his films? Or for that matter, in nearly all the films and TV shows of his slavish imitator J.J. Abrams, that shallow destroyer of sci-fi’s two greatest franchises?
Hollywood’s core message, whether the ostensible topic is aliens, Nazis, or bikinis, is: keep staring with childlike awe and you will transcend, like an angel gazing upon a glorious Hallmark card. It has little to do with politics or philosophy per se and everything with making you love staring at screens, which is, obviously, their bread and butter. Enough.
That bit about the private military contractor may merely reflect the most-plausible-sounding version of current real-world UFO lore. That is, a growing number of credible-sounding whistleblowers say government does know about crashed UFOs and the like but has transferred the evidence and recovered materials to private organizations such as Lockheed Martin to avoid FOIA requests and internal government inspections.
Then again, Hollywood loves sucking up to government, and depicting bad government actions as perpetrated by nominally private entities is a convenient bets-hedging way to tell one’s pals in the Democratic Party: don’t worry, we’re not bashing government itself the way the no-good Republicans would! Similarly, for a few decades, any cowardly Hollywood writer or director wanting to stay on the good side of Cold War Republicans could claim: the film isn’t saying the whole CIA is bad, just a “rogue element” of the CIA!
If this film had layered on some more complex conspiracy elements, it might have at least risen to the level of being a sort of Da Vinci Code from Space. As it is, even the most paranoid among us will be led by the film to suspect nothing more outlandish than that the establishment would like us to grow bored with the topic of aliens now.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey.