Did Steven Spielberg coordinate the release of Disclosure Day with the latest reports coming out of Washington about true-life “close encounters”? Perhaps, perhaps not. One thing they have in common: They’re quite underwhelming.
TMZ trumpeted “new stunning UFO-related videos released by Pentagon,” but a community note clarifies that they are in fact neither “new” nor “stunning.” Some are “artistic renderings” based on people’s descriptions of the vaguely defined thing they saw in the sky. Meanwhile, whistleblower David Grusch announced that the government is aware of at least four types of non-human intelligence, including “bipedal” species and (checks notes) “sentient plasmoid life.” For anyone craving a little panpsychism in your UFOlogy, it’s your lucky day!
This “revelation” was duly repeated on FOX News, but it doesn’t seem to have overturned the existing world order yet. Which means it’s up to the dreamers and storytellers to deliver a fiction more gripping than the reality.
A Movie Out of Time
Alas, Steven Spielberg has not delivered that gripping fiction. Many have pointed out that Disclosure Day fails largely because its grandfatherly director seems unaware of what year it is. The dramatic finale, in which our heroes race to leak stolen alien files to the legacy media, assumes that were NBC, BBC, etc., to start broadcasting The Truth, the world would be glued to the live evening show on their phones. A truly daring film would have explored what disclosure looks like in a world where no one is tuning in, because like all institutions, legacy media stopped earning our trust long ago.
Unsurprisingly, our heroes will have close encounters of the third, fourth, and fifth kinds, but they are all forgettable.The aliens exist purely as a plot device, with no creative glimpses of their language, personality, or goals. If you reach the end of the movie hoping for any sort of surprise twist, or even for some sheer inventiveness like the alien ink code in Arrival, prepare for disappointment. Literally all we will learn is that the aliens would like everyone to be nice to each other and not do a World War III.
Oh yes, World War III is about to happen in this storyverse, but we barely hear about it, and it’s supposed to be rendered irrelevant by the time the aliens show up, because you know… Aliens!
An Assault on Christianity?
Steve Deace has called it a direct assault on Christianity. This wasn’t exactly my impression. I didn’t feel assaulted so much as vaguely condescended to. Our hero’s girlfriend is a jaded Catholic ex-postulant who says she’s lost her faith in God, but by the end it’s suggested that perhaps she’s just “lost her faith in people.” Her benign Mother Superior is unfazed by the prospect of disclosure and believes there’s no contradiction with the Catholic faith. Why couldn’t God have created humans and aliens? This feels like Spielberg’s fumbling attempt at bridge-building in semi-Lewisian fashion.
Meanwhile, there’s more overt Christian symbolism in the mix, but applied in such a muddled way that it isn’t clear where Spielberg even wants to go with it. The girlfriend undergoes a Passion-like ordeal when the villain tries to possess her with ill-gotten alien tech. She clutches a cross necklace and keeps giving herself stigmata-like wounds, and at one point the villain quotes Jesus’ words in Gethsemane to try to hypnotize her into submission.
What’s all of that supposed to Mean? Spielberg only knows. If he makes a hash of Christian symbolism, in fairness he makes a hash of every other kind of symbolism too. This is, after all, a movie whose main characters recall their childhood abductions to a “Hansel and Gretel house,” which we’re supposed to believe is not horrifying but good, actually.
But Deace isn’t wrong that Spielberg has always been drawn to UFOlogy as substitute religion. Unlike in Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, the point of Disclosure Day is not just that aliens exist and God may have His own plan for them, but that they are “closer to God” than we humans are, making them the prophets of the New Age. As Ross Douthat writes, this is obviously in tension with a preexisting religious structure based on a preexisting sacred text. He points back to the old book Chariots of the Gods, which proposed that in fact all of humanity’s religious revelations were mediated by aliens the whole time.
Notably, that’s a pitfall Spielberg has historically been good at avoiding, as when Indiana Jones is forced to grapple with the wrath of a very real Old Testament deity. But like for many American Jews, his personal faith is a mélange of pop spirituality and liberal boomer idealism.
Revelation à la Disney
Spielberg’s alien films seem to have functioned as vehicles for conveying that faith over the decades. Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a metaphor for the way families are splintered when people are gripped by religious zeal — except that all is well, the aliens come in peace, and our hero’s family fracture is just the collateral damage of an arc bending inevitably towards Nirvana. Disclosure Day is less unsettling in that respect, the work of a man with children and grandchildren rather than an unmarried dreamer. But both want to offer a form of sacred revelation via a Disneyfied notion of what religious profundity looks like.
The Disneyfication is literal. At the beginning of Close Encounters, Roy Neary tries in vain to interest his kids in seeing Pinocchio with him. At the end, John Williams’s classic score vindicates him with an echo of “When You Wish Upon a Star.” It’s as if by joining the aliens, Neary has become “a real boy.” Disclosure Day finds Spielberg playing another variation on this theme when the heroine recalls her childhood abduction. In flashback, we watch the little girl humming “Some Day My Prince Will Come” to herself in bed. On cue, the aliens appear in her room disguised as the sort of woodland creatures who hover helpfully around Snow White. (And the CGI is so lazy, they even look cartoonish.)
The point in both stories seems clear: We are most enlightened when we are most in touch with our inner child. So there you have it. This great earth-shattering revelation from the sky is nothing we couldn’t have gotten off the shelf of airport paperbacks about “religion” — or a thrift store shelf of Disney movies.
As I was scrolling Twitter the other day, my timeline happened to juxtapose TMZ’s “stunning” video with some commentary on a recent knife murder in England — an immigrant stabbing a teenage girl to death. It was a reminder that while a few people squint at the sky in search of an extraterrestrial savior, the real world spins on with its real, bloody conflicts. Would the perpetrator put the knife down if an alien asked him politely? I have my doubts.