DISCLOSURE DAY: Steven Spielberg's Newest Masterclass in Genre Filmmaking

As of late, empathy, both in theory and in practice, has taken more than its fair share of knocks, especially from right-wing pundits, public intellectuals like Gad Saad, and the world’s wealthiest man, soon-to-be-trillionaire Elon Musk.

 

It was Saad, a Canadian marketing-professor-turned-philosopher, who coined the term “suicidal empathy” to describe what he considered altruism run amok. It’s not. It’s just the latest gloss on fictional character Gordon Gecko’s credo, “Greed is good,” a poorly argued justification for egotism, selfishness, and self-entitlement.

 

Whether intentional or coincidental, Steven Spielberg’s (The Fabelmans, West Side Story, Bridge of Spies) first film in four years, Disclosure Day, his first science-fiction film since 2018’s misfire, Ready Player One, and his first alien-themed film in more than twenty years, functions thematically, narratively, and dramatically as both a critique and a counter-argument to the anti-empathy proponents like Saad, Musk, and their followers.

 

Disclosure Day centers on the “disclosure” of the title, the day UFO conspiracy theorists have long posited that long-held, long-hidden evidence of alien visitations will be revealed to the general public and/or world. Whether that evidence exists or that day will ever come falls outside this review, but for the characters caught in Spielberg’s in-film web, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a whistleblower carrying a backpack filled with the aforementioned alien-related, state-suppressed secrets, and Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), an itinerant meteorologist for a local Kansas City TV station, it’s not Disclosure Day that will change their lives irrevocably; it’s everything that precedes Disclosure Day. 

 

An employee of a super-secret, government-aligned corporation, WARDEX, Kellner doesn’t escape with those secrets without discovery. In fact, he’s already on the run in the opening minutes, hoping his handler, Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), a senior WARDEX executive gone rogue, can help save Kellner and his girlfriend, Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), from the clutches of WARDEX CEO Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) and his army of black-clad henchmen. If Kellner doesn’t make good his escape, Scanlon wins, and the secrets of alien visitation, up to and including recovered alien technology, will remain hidden from humanity, perhaps permanently. 

 

For Margaret, an odd encounter with a red cardinal that enters her apartment triggers something deeply embedded in her subconscious. Before Margaret or her skeptical boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), can determine what’s happening, Margaret finds herself capable of speaking multiple languages, up to and including a non-human one, and more importantly, connecting with strangers on a deeply personal level. With one glance, Margaret can “read” another person’s unspoken emotional wounds and, with a few reassuring words, instantly uplift the listener to a place of reflection, healing, and reconciliation.

 

That’s exactly where Spielberg and frequent collaborator David Koepp (Jurassic Park: Rebirth, Black Bag, Presence), working from a story idea credited to Spielberg, introduce empathy into Disclosure Day, not as an abstract idea or a suicidal one that will lead to the destruction of civilization as Saad and others would claim, but its opposite, as something approaching salvation. Spielberg and Koepp lean into the concept of salvation, an idea closely aligned with world religions, specifically Christianity, into both a more general spiritual sense and a more material sense too: The world in Disclosure Day seemingly counts down to a third world war and quite possibly something worse. 

 

Those particular ideas aren’t new in Spielberg’s filmography. They’re easily traceable to his third feature-length film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where the benevolent aliens represented a secular version of the angelic beings who appeared with stubborn regularity in the Old Testament. There, a single individual didn’t save the world, only himself. Struck down by an irresistible vision like Paul on the road to Damascus, the central character, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), abandoned his life, his family, and the world itself to experience transcendence (alien contact). It was intensely self-centered, as if communion with the spiritual can only unfold within the hearts and minds of each individual. 

 

Neary’s pursuit of his vision also doubled as an easy, all-too-familiar justification for an artist embracing their true calling, but now, decades later and approaching his 80th birthday, a more introspective Spielberg has a different answer altogether. Pursuing a singular vision isn’t enough, far from it. The answer lies in collective action, in altruism, compassion, and empathy. While a cynic would dismiss it as naive, Disclosure Day turns on self-belief and believing in others to act for the common good.

 

And for all its weighty, provocative ideas, Disclosure Day unfolds not like a dry treatise or polemic about the precarious state of the world as Spielberg sees it, but as a scaled-up science-fiction adventure filled with a not-so-random assortment of scrapes and escapes, all handled with Spielberg’s customary care and eye for exacting detail, and unparalleled mastery of the set piece. WARDEX’s pursuit of Kellner and later Margaret starts with a chase, continues with another chase, and ends, like many cinematic chases do, at or near the beginning, following a not unexpected circular path, but one that runs contrary to both the status quo ante and the political, social, and cultural equilibrium associated with it.