Disclosure Day | Spielberg's Last Crusade?

[00:00:01]Spielberg and Extraterrestrials this week. Look, Close Encounters in ET aren't just great movies. They're epochs of cinema, foundational texts of modern sci-fi. If you hold films to a high standard, it's specifically because movies like this prove what the medium is capable of. Yeah, Men in Black, too.

[00:00:21]That gets full marks. A masterpiece of pacing and tone. There's an asterisk on that one. Spielberg was a producer, but he paid the bills. He put his name on the poster. just wasn't the guy calling the shots on set. But since then, since the 20th century ended, Spielberg's track record of Visitors from Space has been troubling. War of the Worlds of Tom Cruz, I think I could defend the first hour of that movie, but it's a hodgepodge of brilliant ideas completely, spectacularly failing itself in the third act. It lands with all the grace of a deflating balloon. And then crystal skull, I don't want to give it his full name. Crowbaring interdimensional aliens into Harrison Ford's prostate exam was the ultimate no. It was the cinematic equivalent of putting ketchup on steak. It proved that Spielberg was losing his grip on what made Alien Encounters in the first place of his feel so grounded and miraculous.

[00:01:14]Fun bit of trivia for you. Guess who wrote the screenplay for Crystal Skull?

[00:01:19]David Quip. Guess who wrote War of the Worlds? David Qubp. Guess who wrote Disclosure Day? Yeah, Spielberg hired David Qu. Legendary directors don't hire yesmen because they want to be flattered. They hire them because they want Safe Hands. They want someone who will deliver exactly what is asked without starting a civil war on set. But Safe Hands from David Quip, they gave us the Jurassic World still birth. Safe Hands gave us the Tom Cruz Mummy Mets.

[00:01:51]A success eventually buys you an ecosystem completely devoid of friction. When you reach a certain level of status in Hollywood, your collaborators stop acting as editors and start acting as enablers. You trade the violent, exhausting tugof-war of real film making for the industrial inertia of comfort.

[00:02:09]You wheel out a 94 year old John Williams for the score because a 90 plus year old man isn't going to risk his blood pressure getting angsty about a few piano keys being out of order. It's an unconditional comfort pact.

[00:02:21]It begs the question, right? Out of Spielberg Coppler with his megalopouloolis mess.

[00:02:28]And Lucas, why does Scorsesei still have his edge? Because he spent his life locked in a room with Thelma Shoemaker, the woman who will look him in the eyes dead and tell him a scene is bloated and needs to be cut. Scorsese is the only one who's kept his friction alive. Januz Kaminsky is a pinup of cinematography.

[00:02:45]That legendary aggressive backlighting's curdled, doesn't look dreamike anymore.

[00:02:49]looks waxy, smeared, profoundly unnatural. The promotional footage for Disclosure Day has me worried. You look at CGI Animals. You look at the Mr. Darcy led Men in Black and you realize nothing has any physical weight. It looks like a Netflix calculation masquerading as a cinematic event.

[00:03:05]Apparently, Universal's completely hidden the final third of this movie from the marketing at Spielberg's request. So, the terrifying mystery isn't whether we're alone in the universe. It's whether Universal is hiding a paradigm shifting third act or it's a complete structural crime scene to protect an opening weekend's box office. But this can't just be a movie review because it's an autopsy of a legacy. All of this is true.

[00:03:31]>> When you walk into Disclosure Day, you have to ask yourself one terrifying question. Are we about to witness an aging master deliver a late career masterpiece? Are we about to witness his phantom megalopolis menace? What do you think of this boner I got?

[00:03:45]>> So, to judge this film, we've got to measure the director against his own holy mythology. This is Steven Spielberg's last crusade, and we need to see if he survives the three trials.

[00:03:56]Firstly, the breath of God. Is Spielberg a penitent man? Only the penitent man will pass. Is Spielberg going to kneel before the craft for this movie? Does he strip away the billionaire ego and the comfortable CGI safety nets to actually sweat the details behind the camera? Or is he going to walk in standing tall with the arrogance of an untouchable legacy act who thinks his first draft is flawless? And that leads us to the word of God. Did David Quip and the Yesmen build this movie on a solid classical narrative foundation? Did they respect the structural pacing and genuine human stakes? Did they spell Jehovah in Latin?

[00:04:30]or did they step right out onto the modern focus group trap doors of hollow spectacle and let the floor just drop out completely from the entire second act? And then finally, the path of God, the leap of faith, the invisible bridge of studio financing. In the current algorithmic, hyper sterilized era of Hollywood, studios do not fund massive budget high concept sci-fi movies for a 79year-old or Universal Pictures stepped directly off the lion's head. They took the leap of faith solely because of his name. Did they step onto a solid bridge or have they stepped into a bit of late stage blank check disaster? Now the lights are going to go down in my IMAX screen and the architect of our cinematic religion is presenting this audience with two vessels. Do we drink from the right cup for this one? Is he handing us a false grail, a jewel encrusted, focus tested, waxy digital goblet that looks perfect in the marketing but leaves your soul completely empty? The cup that ages your love for cinema right in front of your eyes. Or did the lifelong obsession reignite the fire as he handing us the cup of a carpenter, a rusted, high friction, authentic, and terrifying piece of cinema built his own two hands.

[00:05:41]Hey everyone, John Roer here with my just out of the theater reaction for Disclosure Day. Woo! Baby, what a movie.

[00:05:49]What a movie. This is some of the best of Spielberg. I'm telling you, this is Minority Report Spielberg. This is uh uh ET. This is Jurassic Park Spielberg.

[00:06:01]>> Great. Thanks. We can pack up. Job done.

[00:06:03]The 79year-old billionaire did it again.

[00:06:05]Let's go home. Hang on a minute.

[00:06:08]Minority report Jurassic Park ET. Let's talk about the reality of Disclosure Day. First of all, that marketing mystery, Universal did not hide a paradigm shifting twist. There is no secret third act. The film is exactly what the trailers sold you. Look, Spielberg is still a master craftsman.

[00:06:30]The man can move a camera around like nobody's business. There are sequences in here. They're an absolute delight filled with genuine humor, fun, and that classic Spielbergian awe. Performances solid across the board. Emily Blunt, the absolute standout here. Very heavy job she has to carry on her shoulders and she does it well. Coleman Domingo. I would honestly pay money to have this guy read me the phone book and we can share a hot toddy under a blanket while he does it. His voice is pure silk. Call him first, but he's rock solid as the antagonist and what he has to do. And my soft spot for Josh Oconor just got even softer. Seriously, make this guy bond already. But a masterclass in directing cannot save a script that has had every single edge sanded off. In a recent interview, Spielberg actually mentioned he wrote a lot of the story down on his iPad notes app. He was on his holiday somewhere, most likely drinking panina coladas and eating chilled monkey brains. Then he emailed it to his old buddy David Qu, who printed it out, rustled a few pages, left some coffee mug stains on the title page, and said, "Done." There is zero friction in this movie. It relies entirely on an actual magic wand. And Disclosure Day thinks that by waving the magic wand to solve the characters problems, it also applies to all of humanity's problems. Every systematic, geopolitical, societal wrong in the world. Don't worry, Spielberg solves it all on his D-Day and then we're just done. This comes from a place of frustration because this feels like a massive wasted opportunity. But the most frustrating part of Disclosure Day is the sheer arrogance of the message.

[00:08:05]We're actually watching a billionaire telling us he has the answers to all the absolute shite going on in the world right now. He genuinely thinks the extraterrestrials showing up and saying, "Hello," would somehow fix us. It would certainly change our perspective, but it wouldn't change our fate. Look back at Munich. Look back at War of the Worlds.

[00:08:23]Those were films where Spielberg was actively wrestling with the cycle of violence. They had teeth and grit.

[00:08:29]Disclosure Day completely misses the point because it ignores the cycle of humanity. We are doomed as a species ultimately because we fundamentally refuse to learn from the lessons of our own past. The film tries to fleetingly touch on these massive heavy themes.

[00:08:45]Corporate greed, the loss of faith, the vital importance of reporting the unvarnished truth. But these stories are so much better told in isolation grounded in reality. You want to see the importance of the truth. Go watch Spotlight. Go watch Spielberg's The Post. Instead, the wider message of Disclosure Day is that God has also created other beings and they're coming down to bail us out in our darkest hour.

[00:09:06]It's the ultimate fantasy of a billionaire. It's the worldview of a man who has never had to say no to anything and who wields so much power and wealth now that everyone around him is terrified to say no to him. There are far more interesting set of files released recently. Yeah. Yeah. You know the ones I'm on about. Those files didn't shine a soft focus cinematic light on billionaires. files that expose the actual nature of evil, power, and the corruption that humanity is currently running on. Until humanity can actually look inward and confront our deepest human issues, I don't think any other worldly species is going to want a damn thing to do with us. It's actually quite dangerous to put this kind of hollow, unearned hope out into the world right now when we actually need to confront the things that will damn us all. And you know what? It doesn't matter if you have all the technical brilliance and interesting set pieces in the world if you cannot deliver on the foundational promises of the narrative.

[00:09:53]This movie was literally on the studios calendars as untitled Steven Spielberg UFO event. Let's be brutally honest. If JJ Abrams released this movie, if Colin Trevor Mo or Ryan Johnson directed this script, they'd be slaughtered online today because of this story and because it's got the Spielberg stamp.

[00:10:10]People are desperately trying to give it a pass. So, let's stop giving it a pass.

[00:10:16]Now, we don't often do this on our reviews, but we are going to be spoilerastic right here, right now. If you haven't seen Disclosure Day, like us, subscribers, and get the hell out of here. Go watch it or don't. But for the rest of you, let's talk about it. The plot, it hinges on the idea that aliens have been visiting us since Roswell, and the government covered it up. But the crux of the mythology is that eventually the government decided they couldn't be trusted with the alien secret. There's a line about how presidents are civilians again after 8 years. It feels wildly optimistic in today's political climate, but control was handed over to these evil, nasty corporations to lock the aliens up and experimented on them and tortured them to a degree. But apparently before they were captured, the aliens sat around and dropped some dormant powers into two random kids in the '90s so they could activate them later, right on the brink of World War II, destroying humanity.

[00:11:11]And to get close to the kids, the aliens disguise themselves as CGI animals so as not to frighten the children.

[00:11:20]But wrapping your extraterrestrials in like this waxy digital deer skin is certainly a choice. Anyway, the entire movie is a race against time for these two chosen kids who now grow up to be Emily Blunt and Josh Oconor broadcasting the truth. And thank goodness the aliens were such excellent career planets. By pure coincidence, the little girl grows up to be the weather reporter with direct access to a national news broadcast. And the little boy, the aliens gifted him incredible savant level math skills, age 15, so he could get a job working inside the exact evil corporation hiding the aliens, stumble upon a video, them being tortured, and join a group rebelling against the corporation.

[00:11:58]I mean, it gets worse. There's this power of convenience the whole film has.

[00:12:03]Emily Blunt suddenly gets the ability to read minds, appear to people as lost members of their own families, meaning she can literally walk anywhere, past any human obstacle, and do whatever she wants. Security checkpoint. Well, that security guard is now talking to his dead grandma. She walks right through.

[00:12:19]Why bother writing a tense, clever escape sequence, and your heroes can just stroll through straight through the conflict? And then there's the McGuffin, an alien piece of metal that seemingly does everything except lead our heroes to a fallen Death Star. Colin Fur evil corporate villain uses it to teleport his mind anywhere in the world, allowing to get to our heroes at least three or four times and catch up with them. But wait, later in the film, Emily Blunt gets the thing and suddenly she can make it make entire things invisible and then the power to the news station's cut.

[00:12:48]Don't worry, the alien method will be a backup generator for the entire building. It's not a plot device. It's an algorithmic Swiss army knife of plot armor. And in the ending, the power's back on. They deliver the news to the world. Everyone on Earth freezes and looks at the alien footage on their screens. Then a bigger alien is dramatically wheeled into the news studio. It leans in and whispers Sunny to Emily Blunt that we don't hear. And Josh O'Connor. Emily Blunt turns, looks dead in the camera, and says, "Listen, cut to black. Roll credits." When that screen cut to black in my IMAX theater, there's this collective audible groan of what from the audience, the air completely left the room. It's a classic third act fail. At a certain point in this movie, the characters stop making decisions. They stop driving the story and just become passengers for the plot.

[00:13:36]They become empty vessels waiting for Spielberg's alien magic wand to do the heavy lifting. Even the antagonist, the villain gives up. Colin Fur's character literally just sits down in the chair at the end, stops fighting, and watches the broadcast, exhausted and deflate. And honestly, that feels pretty apt because I sat there in the dark, exhausted and deflated by 2 and 1/2 hours of storytelling that led to this moment.

[00:13:59]And as I was shuffling out the lobby, I heard a particularly fruity gentleman walking behind me declaring loudly to his friend, "They should have called it nondisclosure day." And he was absolutely right. All the buildup and everything, nothing. This is supposed to be a movie filled with hope for humanity, a definitive movie for the post-truth era. But it hits pause at the exact moment the truth arrives. We don't get to see what this news means for humanity. It's vaguely hinted at by a montage of soldiers on the front line looking at the broadcast on their phones. Not entirely sure where North Korea's infantry got a 5G network and smartphones to do this, but hey, Mr. Plot convenience strikes again. The entire philosophical crux of the movie is a debate about whether the truth will destroy us or save us. But when the moment comes, the movie doesn't follow through. And I get it. Themes, messages, leaving things open to interpretation.

[00:14:51]Sometimes as a viewer, you got to call Here's the TLDDR. Spielberg doesn't have the answers. He's just a rich, egoinflated sense of self-importance.

[00:15:03]Maybe though he did inadvertently reveal something about us.

[00:15:07]Right now in the real world, you have 20some kids like Kane Parsons making headlines with back rooms. You have young filmmakers coming up and redefining the medium Curry Park with obsession. Look, last year Spielberg actively moderated a postcreening Q&A for Paul Thomas Anderson's one battle after another. And his love for that film and cinema came across so intoxicatingly. He can tell he still has that youthful vigor in him somewhere when he talks about other people's work.

[00:15:34]But Disclosure Day is maybe just a sign of an old man failing to rise to the occasion of his own. One film does not make a man's entire legacy. There's a palpable feeling of a torch finally being passed in Hollywood to younger generation. And it's not the first time we've seen this particular cycle. In the 70s, Spielberg, Lucas, Coppa, his they all stepped up and dismantled the old studio system. In the 90s, we saw the passing of the torch again with Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson.

[00:16:03]Maybe the ultimate meaning to extract from Disclosure Day isn't about aliens at all. It's the realization that time finally gets youth shine. Look at the real world. An entire generation of oxygenarians desperately cling to the higher seats of power, refusing to pass the baton. You have to ask yourself, isn't it time we let the youth shape our world?

[00:16:25]We need people who aren't beaten down by decades of industrial cynicism. We need voices that actually have genuine hope and optimism for the future. Not just an iPad, notes app, and a blank check and panina coladas. And David Quirk, it brings us back to the grail. At the start of this video, I asked if we were walking into Spielberg's last crusade, a master having one last triumphant harrah.

[00:16:48]After sitting in the IMAX theater and watching the architect of our cinematic religion choose the polished, frictionless digital goblet, I realized I had the title wrong.

[00:16:58]This was not Spielberg's last crusade.

[00:17:02]This was Spielberg's lost crusade.