Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” ends with the moment that the film’s title promises. Humanity is presented, all at once, with incontrovertible evidence that extraterrestrial life exists, that aliens have visited Earth, and that the world’s governments and militaries have covered up decades of interactions.
Based on the marketing campaign, this is not much of a spoiler, but how it happens is worth seeing in a theater with a clear mind. (This is your warning.)
In a heart-stopping sequence that serves as the movie’s climax, Daniel (Josh O’Connor) and Margaret (Emily Blunt), the heroes of the story, initiate a TV broadcast that quickly goes worldwide.
I was afraid the film was going to end with somebody clicking “play” on the trove of archival material and leaving the rest to our imaginations, but Spielberg — who, after all, invented summer movie magic as we know it — does not flinch.
People across the world watch on their phones and on communal screens as they’re shown unedited footage of alien aircraft emerging from clouds, non-human bodies pulled from wreckage, military use of reverse-engineered superhuman technology and the apparent torture of interstellar visitors.
Blunt and O’Connor are captivating as leads, but the movie’s best performance comes from Courtney Grace as a flustered news anchor presenting the material in real time while also realizing that her own idea of reality has permanently shifted.
Our price of admission includes the moderate suspension of disbelief. It would require, for instance, an unrealistic amount of credulity within the media business, in an era of sophisticated deep-faking and widespread public mistrust, for this to happen without even the thinnest layer of editorial scrutiny. But whatever: Spielberg is cooking, so just play along.
In the background, humanity is gripped in a conflict that remains vague but seems to involve North Korea launching a nuclear world war. The film implies that the moment of disclosure would pull the world back from the brink of self-annihilation.
“Disclosure Day” asks us to believe something preposterous. Not that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization has mastered interstellar travel yet somehow can’t keep their aircraft from crashing in our deserts. And not that the aliens, when they make themselves known, look exactly like creatures from other Spielberg movies.
It is the idea that such a disclosure would produce anything besides a few days of sober coverage before our toxic discourse would resume as usual.
The protagonists are dissidents who want to reveal the truth, while the bad guys — led by Colin Firth, wearing a villainous-looking scarf — are government security contractors who will stop at nothing to keep the information secret, fearing the social upheaval that sudden disclosure would create.
Disclosure, they assume, would undermine government authority, unravel religious belief systems and destabilize the world order. The dissidents, led by Hugo (Coleman Domingo), insist that knowing we are not alone would reinstate human solidarity, empathy and collective humility about our place in the universe.
Both factions badly overestimate humanity in its current condition, as does Spielberg. “Disclosure Day” imagines a world that would actually believe this evidence is authentic, not a media hoax. It imagines a world where people would reach out to their loved ones instead of making memes, crafting clever reactions on social media or reposting A.I. slop.
It presumes a reverence for science in a nation whose leadership has gutted research funding, delegitimized expertise and waged ideological warfare against our institutions of higher education. It imagines a nation where our political parties, even in an election year, would unite in awe instead of blaming each other for the cover-up.
“Disclosure Day” envisions a nation responding in shock and outrage to the idea of extraterrestrials being treated inhumanely. Meanwhile, half the country voted for an administration that has disappeared thousands of human immigrants, many of them here legally, into mass detention facilities without due process.
At nearly 80 years old, Spielberg, who has made 35 films and activated millions of imaginations, has earned the right to be hopeful. But in “Disclosure Day,” it feels as if he’s visiting an entirely different planet.