It’s Spielberg’s first movie-of-the-week in a half century!
Now 79, Steven Spielberg has spent the past few years dredging up his roots. His previous film, The Fabelmans, was a cinematic version of an autobiographical novel, following the course of his life from age 6 to age 18. What was weird about The Fabelmans is that usually such works are the first publications of a budding writer rather than a septuagenarian’s career capstone. Now he’s gone and made a movie about aliens called Disclosure Day, so you might think it’s a return to his glory days as the auteur of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. But it doesn’t resemble those landmark works at all, either in quality or meaning. Close Encounters literally incepted serious science fiction as a box-office staple and E.T. was an unparalleled modern fairy tale that was for a decade the highest-grossing film ever made.
No, what Disclosure Day really evokes is his pre-movie television juvenilia—by which I mean his earliest professional work, as a director of series episodes and made-for-TV movies. If you’re not in your 60s, you don’t really know about the Movie of the Week. This was a staple of the American pop-culture junk diet in the 1970s. ABC aired one, or two, movies-of-the-week every week for years. They were the genius brainchild of the visionary Barry Diller, who figured out his network could make original fare for $450,000 a pop rather than paying Universal $600,000. There were comedies, mysteries, ghost stories, sensitive dramas. They ran in a 90-minute time slot, and since they needed to accommodate commercials, they had to be 72 minutes long. They were made quick and dirty, starring series actors on their summer breaks or has-beens between gigs. No one expected them to be good, and they mostly weren’t, but neither was most TV at the time.
Spielberg made four. One was a segment of an anthology called Night Gallery, in which the 22-year-old Spielberg directed the 65-year-old Joan Crawford, playing a mean blind woman who has her sight restored for a day, only to discover there’s a blackout. Another was a Rosemary’s Baby knockoff called Something Evil with the very, very nervous actress Sandy Dennis. Savage was about a reporter who gets dirt on a Supreme Court nominee. But it was the 90-minute car-vs.-truck chase he directed called Duel, universally considered the best MOW ever made, that opened the doors of the cinema wide for him.
Spielberg was the only major director to rise out of the Movie of the Week factory. So there’s something kind of touching about Disclosure Day’s evocation of the junk he had to helm to get his career going. I’m sure that’s not what he intended to do here, since the movie derives from an original idea of his (though the screenplay is by someone else) and therefore theoretically some kind of passion project. But it’s just too silly to take seriously.
There’s a whistleblower who works for a shadowy agency that has been hiding the existence of aliens on the planet for decades. He has a former nun for a girlfriend (don’t ask) who gets mind-controlled by an alien device commandeered by the evil shadowy agency chief. A TV weather girl in Kansas City develops supernatural powers all of a sudden. And for some reason, the world is about to descend into World War III, though why that’s even a plot point here we never figure out.
There’s something trashy and slapdash about it from first moment to last. Characters crisscross the country in a matter of minutes by car, and there are three separate alien devices around that can do just about anything you’d need them to do when you get yourself trapped at a plot dead-end. Even the cinematography by the brilliant Janusz Kaminski (a double Oscar winner) doesn’t look very good. And the very obvious musical score, by the legendary John Williams—who is 94 years old—sadly sounds like the kind of thing Williams wrote for TV shows in the early 1960s before he broke into the big leagues.
But you know what? Aside from some incredibly incoherent references to religion and God and faith that never pay off in the least, Disclosure Day doesn’t really have an idea in its head. And that’s all to the good. It has the signature quality of the Movie of the Week, which is unpretentiousness. And speed. It never lags, though it isn’t especially involving, and it’s fun to watch. Colin Firth, as the bad guy, and Colman Domingo, as a bad-guy-turned-good-guy, chomp the scenery with amusing relish. Emily Blunt has some genuine comic juice as the ditzy weather-reader who just begins reading minds and speaking Russian and Korean out of nowhere, and gets a real rhythm going with the delightful Wyatt Russell as her disbelieving boyfriend. (Fun fact: Wyatt Russell is the son of Goldie Hawn, who starred in Spielberg’s first theatrical release, The Sugarland Express, a mere 52 years ago.)
Disclosure Day is basically a throwaway B-movie made by history’s foremost A-list director. It’s an oddity, really, but I’ve had way worse times at the movies.