Disclosure Day begins and ends in direct address. The film starts by showing the audience a wrestler, who throws them to the ground, stomping on the face of the camera repeatedly—a hostile way to pay tribute to John Ford (via the boxing flashback in The Quiet Man) compared to Steven Spielberg’s cute and quaint conclusion to The Fabelmans. The ending is as formally aggressive, if quite a bit subtler in its manipulations.
When Spielberg launches his film in media res by having Disclosure Day open with its chase already in motion, where Josh O’Connor’s character is already on the run from the defense contractor Wardex, there’s a drive akin to the religiosity of his other films, be that the spirit of truth in The Post or the unknowable guidance of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This is conveyed on the surface through the discussions by characters—like that between O’Connor’s ex-nun girlfriend and her former Mother Superior—but also through the filmmaking itself, where Spielberg’s camera ceaselessly glides towards the inevitable, his unbroken shots moving with the tricks of a Disneyland dark ride.
The inevitable that Spielberg reaches is the filmic conclusion, one where everything in his story flows into each other like a river confluence, dumping into a delta of emotion, where all the secrets are finally revealed and everything withheld from the audience finally shows itself. This is deceptive, to say the least, deceptive in the same way a corporation charged with protecting vital information might be. But Spielberg believes that his manipulative methods are the best for reaching the maximum potential of delivery.
That’s because Disclosure Day, like most of Spielberg’s films, is prefaced on an idea of universal perception. That is: that in the space of the movie theater, he can create the same feeling for everyone.
The big mistake in trying to read Disclosure Day as a statement on the present—whether his liberal Zionist perception of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, or even the use of UAP news drops to distract from Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein—is that Spielberg’s cinema is almost entirely insular. Spielberg movies draw their textures from plenty of real-life (and even hot-button) sources, but they rarely comment on them in terms that translate to the real world. Instead, Spielberg’s conceptions of narrative and truth exist entirely confined to the diegesis of the films themselves, which allows him more control towards those conceptions.
Some point to The Fabelmans as the primary evidence that everything in Spielberg’s cinema relates back to his parents’ divorce. But far before those marital troubles started to show themselves, Spielberg opens the film with his ur-trauma: his first trip to a movie. Seeing The Greatest Show on Earth was apparently so mentally destructive for him, that Spielberg would fashion his whole life from thereon trying to reclaim control of images.
It’s from that position that Spielberg speaks to the audience once again at the end of Disclosure Day. Here a single character embodies Spielberg’s favorite things, the reaction shot, as a news reporter walks the audience along about how to feel about seeing declassified images of aliens for the first time. The world stands by, on their phones, as the truth is finally shown to them. This isn’t something that happens in the real world anymore. There’s no unified media—and certainly not unified reactions—amidst what should be world-shattering horrors. Instead, the space that Spielberg’s most interested in is the theater that people are sitting in watching the movie itself, a crowd that he has (if he’s successful) gotten all to the same point emotionally in his build-up so that he can have them all share in the same reaction at the end.