I don’t like E.T.

I know that might be a controversial take, and I respect the film’s place in history, but I don’t think the movie has aged well. In particular, I don’t like how the title character’s death is such a hugely iconic emotional plot point, right before that same character is revived. Brought back to life with no effort or consequence, like nothing happened. And no explanation is necessary because he’s an alien. Sorry, but that storytelling is so cheap and lazy I can’t possibly buy into it.

More importantly, the antagonists are out to capture and vivisect E.T. Literally cut the alien open while he’s still alive, with no provocation or consent. I’m no genius, but that seems like a pretty surefire way to start a war with an alien race that has superior technology, i.e. directly cause the well-deserved extinction of humanity.

Cut to forty years later, and Spielberg is coming out with Disclosure Day, a film made and marketed on the central premise of a government conspiracy to hide the existence of aliens. And I’m surprised we’re still doing this. After 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Benghazi, and the January 9th insurrection, how the nine hells could anyone still believe that the American government would be capable of a covert operation on this scale?

Furthermore, we already know for an absolute fact that the U.S. government would never cover up the existence of aliens. Because NASA makes a big fucking deal every time they find a potentially habitable planet a hundred light years away, or signs that Mars might have hosted a single-celled organism back in the ancient past. They will take literally any excuse to make headlines so they can raise public awareness and drive their budgets up. Hell, 45/47 promised to release everything the government has on aliens, just so he could change the news cycle. And he released exactly squat.

Then again, Steven Spielberg movies never really operated on logic. Spielberg’s evil genius has always been his uniquely uncanny ability to operate on an emotional level. Nobody can do mindless feel-good schmaltz like Spielberg, and his latest is proof.

The plot is centered around Wardex, a shadowy government contractor responsible for protecting government secrets. Specifically, Wardex is primarily concerned with government activity pertaining to extraterrestrials, going at least as far back as Roswell. Colin Firth plays Noah Scanlon, the head of Wardex, who zealously guards these secrets out of fear for how humanity would react. Colman Domingo plays Hugo Wakefield, a high-ranking Wardex scientist who recently went rogue and recruited a dozen other Wardex employees in a plot to steal and disclose everything Wardex knows. And we’re off to the races from there.

Our de facto protagonist is Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity expert recruited by Wardex fresh out of a prison sentence for cybercrimes. Long story short, he’s on the run with a backpack full of double-top-secret government files and a weird piece of alien tech. What’s worse, some girl he hooked up with one time (Jane, played by Eve Hewson) got roped into all this, so now he’s also stuck trying to protect a civilian while running from the feds and trying to meet up with the rest of the resistance.

But wait! There’s more!

Emily Blunt plays Margaret Fairchild, a meteorologist working for a local news station in Kansas City. And one day, completely out of nowhere, she manifests psychic abilities and starts talking in weird languages. It’s not immediately clear how, but as soon as the Wardex thugs show up, it becomes clear that she’s connected to all this nonsense and she has to meet up with Daniel immediately. Luckily, her new psychic abilities make it strangely easy for her to find him.

(Side note: A nod is due to Delaney Cuthbert, the young girl who persistently showed up in the commercials and ads for her brief screentime playing ten-year-old Margaret.)

There is a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with the major problems.

Even at a runtime of two and a half hours, the plot is undercooked. The plot is supposedly driven by geniuses, and yet the plot only advances by virtue of vaguely defined telepathic powers and contrived fluke errors on the part of our characters. To say nothing of the alien device that’s pretty much an all-purpose magic wand to fix the plot. Moreover, while this whole movie is more or less about the conflict between Noah and Hugo, the film only hints at their deeper motivations (something about Noah’s wife and Hugo’s encounter with an alien) while leaving the specifics frustratingly unclear.

I might further add that the secondary leads are pretty weak. I can appreciate how Jane — a former nun — is there to speak about the religious implications of proving the existence of aliens. And I like Wyatt Russell’s attempts to bring some comic relief into the mix as Margaret’s romantic partner. Unfortunately, the romantic chemistry isn’t there with the characters’ respective leads. It certainly doesn’t help that the nature of these relationships and what these characters see in each other is terribly murky. The David/Jane relationship is especially awful — given what we learn about her time as a nun and his time going directly from a prison sentence to clandestine super-secret government work, I can’t get a clear fix on what the timeline was, how or when they got to know each other, or why they care for each other enough to sufficiently motivate their actions in the plot.

And again, it bears remembering that the basic premise of a government conspiracy to cover-up the existence of aliens is ridiculous on its face. But in this case, the concept is less important than the allegory.

Noah makes it perfectly clear that he’s not doing this because he’s afraid of the aliens. In fact, he’s perfectly reckless in using alien technology he barely understands. No, it’s stated outright that Noah is only interested in maintaining the status quo, keeping the human populace ignorant and divided. Never mind that World War III is apparently winding up somewhere off-camera (another long and hugely important storyline this movie only barely glosses over), Noah in his infinite wisdom apparently thinks the alternative is that much worse.

This is very much a movie about the wealthy and powerful keeping humanity divided and helpless by feeding us lies and slanted truths. As presented in this movie, the aliens are really only a metaphor for some grand objective truth that’s so big and so undeniable that it transcends boundaries and cannot be ignored or buried. Like how small and petty our differences are in the grand scheme of things. Or how killing and torturing sentient beings for no reason at all is wrong.

Oh, and of course we can’t forget the central role that mass media and film/TV producers have in spreading the word. It’s always a bit self-aggrandizing for a filmmaker to make that statement so clearly and loudly as Spielberg is here. That said, I found it nicely refreshing to see a film that spotlights the power of smartphone technology and social media to bring us together instead of delivering yet another ignorant and technophobic screed about the topic. (Yes, I’m looking directly at Gore Verbinski, Adam McKay, Ari Aster, Kristoffer Borgli…) What’s more, after seeing how we in real life were all so riveted to our screens and taking part in such a huge world-stopping event like 9/11 or the January 6th insurrection, I found it genuinely wholesome to think about the possibility that it that could happen over something positive and uplifting.

Is Disclosure Day a good movie or a bad movie? To be perfectly blunt, it’s a Spielberg movie. More than that, it feels like the capstone to a long and storied career. Much as I hate to say it, there’s no denying that Spielberg is 79 years old. And John Williams is freaking 94. This is the first time in 50 years when Spielberg directed a movie that Michael Kahn didn’t edit, likely because Kahn is 95! Melissa Mathison died back in 2015, and Janusz Kaminski (age 66) is no spring chicken either.

Of course I wish long and healthy lives to all these visionaries (RIP Mathison), and there’s a good chance that Spielberg might have another ten or fifteen good years left in him. But that’s not a lot of time to make more movies at the scale we expect from him. And so many of his trusted collaborators are dead or dying, it’s entirely possible that the next Spielberg movie may look radically different from what we’d expect of him. Even as it is, this movie looks and feels radically different for having Sarah Broshar in the editing booth, and what the hell would a Spielberg movie look or feel like without a John Williams score?!

The film deserves to be seen, witnessed, remembered, and chronicled as the grand final thesis of the man who — for better or worse, rightly or wrongly — will go down in history as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers who ever held a camera. Let it be known that for (what could potentially be) his final movie, he went out on an inspirational and hopeful note about the nobility of humankind and the power of stories. The plot may be flawed, but it’s a bold and full-throated message delivered on a monumental scale as only Spielberg could’ve done it, and he should be applauded for putting so much time and effort into it when he’s got so little left.

Furthermore, at a time when the public is starved for huge event movies that aren’t based on existing IP, this is the kind of movie we need more of. Adjust your expectations, but go check it out.