I’m going to say it right from the start; Steven Spielberg’s latest film ‘Disclosure Day’ is the shiniest piece of shit I’ve ever seen. Oh, it’s a great movie, a taunt, gripping plot, wonderfully acted, with intense action sequences and top notch special effects, everything we’ve come to expect from Spielberg.
At the same time however it’s nothing more than a rehash of all the old, by now very old conspiracy theories about how the government is keeping all of the evidence of alien visitations a secret, about alien abductions and captured alien technology. Even the aliens themselves are nothing more than updated CGI versions of the ones from Spielberg’s original alien film ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ released back in 1977.
But let’s talk about the film first. The two main characters are Margaret Fairchild, played with great effect by Emily Blunt, and Dr. Daniel Kellner, played by Josh O’Connor. Margaret is a weather forecaster at a local TV station in Kansas City while Daniel is a cybersecurity specialist working for a secret company called Wardex, a company that has been created by the government with the task of preventing all evidence of alien activity here on Earth from becoming known to the general public. The Men in Black of UFO lore!
At the beginning of the film Daniel has stolen numerous data files containing massive amounts of that evidence which he is trying to get to Hugo Wakefield, played by Colman Domingo, a former employee of Wardex who has organized a group of people trying to ‘disclose’ all the evidence.
The head of Wardex is Noah Scanlon, played against type by Colin Firth. While Firth is nicely creepy in his performance the other Wardex characters are nothing but soulless thugs in black, riding around in black vehicles or sitting in front of computer screens in dark rooms. The villains are the worst part of ‘Disclosure Day’, with the exception of Firth they are nothing but cartoons.
Meanwhile weathercaster Margaret has had a visit in her apartment from a male Cardinal, the bird kind of Cardinal, who triggers something miraculous in her. Suddenly she is able to read other people’s deepest thoughts and emotions, she knows about things happening hundreds of miles away. The aliens, in the form of an animal, have endowed her with ‘special powers.
Most of ‘Disclosure Day’ consists of chases and narrow escapes as Daniel and Margaret both try to reach Hugo. I’ll go no further in order to avoid any spoilers, except for one last spoiler at the end of this post.
Instead I’d like to talk about the influence that ‘Disclosure Day’ may have on the debate about alien visitations and UFOs in general. In the seventy-nine years now since Kenneth Arnold first reported his sighting of ‘Flying Saucers’ nothing has ‘promoted’ the idea of aliens visiting Earth as much as the 1977 film ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ which was produced and directed by Steven Spielberg just as he has now done with ‘Disclosure Day’. Although it is hard to obtain accurate numbers, in the years following ‘Close Encounters’ the number of UFO sightings at least tripled and numerous books and magazine articles about aliens were published.
The actual evidence for UFOs in the 1970s was actually no better than it had been back in the middle 1950s, sightings of strange, apparently solid objects by reputable witnesses along with a few reliable photos and even fewer films. But that didn’t stop millions of people from suddenly believing in aliens, now we even had tales of people being abducted and ‘probed’ by ETs!
I vividly remember one incident I had just about a year after ‘Close Encounters’ came out. The episode happened on a beautiful, clear early evening in May, an hour or so before sunset. I was walking along an avenue near my home, walking past a graveyard by the way, when I looked west and saw what is still the best Sundog I’ve ever seen. It was oval in shape and it’s edges were much sharper than a normal Sundog, which is what made it the best I’ve ever seen. It was clearly a Sundog however because it was just about 45º to the right of the Sun and at the same height above the horizon.
As I was watching the Sundog, yes I stop to watch things like Sundogs; a man came walking along and saw me staring to the west. “Oh, my God,” he said. “That’s a Flying Saucer!”
“No,” I told him. “It’s a Sundog. Ice crystals in the atmosphere are reflecting the light of the Sun.” I explained while pointing to the Sundog and the Sun.
Disappointed at my description he walked away while muttering. “Anybody can see it’s a Flying Saucer”. He’d never heard about Sundogs but he’d knew all about Flying Saucers.
That’s why I think that “Disclosure Day’ is a bad film. It’s just going to generate a lot more argument about flying saucers and aliens without providing any better evidence than we had back when I was born!
SPOILER ALERT: If you don’t want to hear anything about the end of ‘Disclosure Day’ then skip the next paragraph.
One more thing, at the very end of the film, while Margaret and Daniel are releasing all of the files on UFOs to the world, Hugo brings out an actual alien that his group has rescued from Wardex. Think about that, Hugo spend the entire movie waiting for Daniel and Margaret to get him all of the videos and other evidence so they could publish it, but he had a real live alien the whole time!!! Why didn’t he just go to CNN or ABC News or MSNBC or etc. etc. and just say, “You want evidence of aliens…here’s one!!!!” If you think about it that last little scene kinda makes the whole movie really ridiculous!