It's the bird's fault, I tell you
dir: Spielbergo
2026
Ugh. To be so foolish as to think that I was to be made happy by a Spielbergo film this late in the game…
Perhaps the problem with late stage Spielberg is the same problem with late stage capitalism – it just doesn’t deliver any of the stuff it promised it would bring, and basically threatens us with “well, what else are you going to do, anyway, fuckheads? Amuse yourselves, somehow?”
At this stage you could think no other director has devoted as much of his career to stories about aliens as Spielberg has with as much success, and you’d probably be right. Though we forget, because he’s made so many films that don’t have aliens, that he is the premiere imaginer of what those interactions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ would look like, could look like, should look like.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind wasn’t his first flick, but it did begin his very memorable love affair with all things alien which at the time seemed novel: a view of alien life that wasn’t automatically a threat to humanity, that still conformed with the general concepts of mid-20th century UFO sci-fi ideas in the popular consciousness. E.T. the Extra-terrestrial further cemented the idea that if there be aliens, they might be hideous/cute weirdoes that like candy and just want to hang out before phoning home, and that they didn’t necessarily bear us any ill-will.
Sure, War of the Worlds had Martians killing as many people as they could as revenge for, I dunno, polluting their planet with radioactive robots or some such, but that didn’t represent a break up or anything: that was the part of a long term relationship where someone’s grown bored with their partner, and maybe thinks about fucking around or roleplaying just to feel alive again.
Disclosure Day, to a baffling purpose, returns him to more familiar ground reassuring us, the great unwashed, that if aliens exist, they’re still not a threat to us.
But we remain a threat to them and to each other. In fact, the premise here relies on reasserting familiar tropes about aliens all over again: Roswell actually did happen, aliens have been crashing their flying saucers onto our planet and abducting people and presumably probing them for decades, and that there are quasi-government goons tasked with keeping this knowledge out of the public’s hands.
Just like all the dumbest conspiracy theorists always said!
I say “quasi-government” because they go way out of their way to assure us that Wardex, the group of well-funded baddies led by a banally evil Colin Firth, are like a corporate entity that’s gotten fat off of torturing and dissecting aliens, stealing their technologies, and ruthlessly supressing the truth: that aliens aren’t out there, they’re already here.
Every conspiracy is true, the X-Files were a documentary, and the rest of us have been none the wiser, thinking it’s all just fiction, lulled into a false sense of security.
Also, we’ve been bumbling along believing in religions and spiritual bullshit that posits humanity as the greatest, most superior beings in the universe, not knowing that there were a stack of aliens out there way better than us. Presumably created in His actual, divine image.
So there’s one group of people conspiring to use alien technology to continue to hide the fact that they have alien technology, and another group of people who are forced to use alien technology to reveal the fact that aliens exist. And they’ll fight, back and forth, for over two hours of our lives, until one side just stone cold, plain, gives up, and the other keeps going for the One, Big Broadcast of The Truth that will change everyone in the world’s individual minds simultaneously, all in one go, together.
Spielbergo has been accused of many things over the years. Of being overly sentimental. Of being painfully literal. Of being cheesy. Of being too self-serious. Rarely do I recall anyone accusing him of being stunningly, gobsmackingly, astoundingly naïve about human nature. He’s plumbed the depths of it, and perhaps some of the highlights, but
The Spielberg that made this film feels that the world has gone a little bonkers because people aren’t listening to each other anymore, and have lost a little of their capacity for empathy. If only they could be united by something, and start listening…
There are after school specials from the 80s, there are Hallmark cards, there are marriage vows written by unromantic footballers and their soon to be ex-wives that aren’t as clueless, as astoundingly naïve as this…
This is not a flick I can criticise on the basis of the acting, or the visuals, or the editing, or the cinematography, or the clothing or anything like that. Of course the most successful American movie director of all time can cobble together an elite crew of filmmaker and effects people to realise his visions at a moment’s notice and devote astounding resources to whatever takes his fancy.
It’s just that… What is it all in service of? This? This?
Josh O’Connor and his superbly overacting ears, pretending to be an American, and Emily Blunt, pretending to be an American, and Eve Hewson pretending to be an American and an ex-nun as well. They run around and do things that the plot requires of them, which is okay, I guess, for Josh and Eve’s characters, but Emily Blunt’s character of Margaret Fairchild does wonderful, magical, mystical things as required by the script. If she needs to go to Kansas City or North Dakota, to a particular road, at a particular time, she just does so, because… something something alien abduction when she was ten?
O’Connor’s Daniel character was also kidnapped, abducted etc, and forever changed (spoilers!), and he and Margaret share this link which is far more important than his link with Jane (Hewson), his girlfriend of several months that he knows absolutely nothing about just so that he can be shocked by everything she says, and she knows absolutely nothing about him, so she can be amazed when he dialogue drops some hefty exposition.
Daniel, and almost everyone else in the movie either works for Wardex or used to work at Wardex, so Colin Firth’s character (the only Brit who doesn’t bother with an American accent) hates pretty much all of them. I have seen him play the villain before in other stuff, but not like this. There’s a cold malevolence to the performance that manages to transcend the cheapness of some of the material. The nature of the story requires him to torture people from a distance using magical technology, but the way he does it is quite bracing.
And then he just gives up. Maybe part of it is that Margaret’s magical alien powers allow her to see the one thing in each person’s mind that bugs them the most, and to alleviate it for them with some well chosen words. She manages to show him that he’s been emotionally cut off from his work (of torturing aliens) ever since his wife died, and that it’s that callousness which is leading him to take extraordinary measures, like murder humans, in order to maintain power.
Maybe it’s the later conversation with his former friend and colleague Hugo (the always great, always dependable Colman Domingo) that reconnects him with his humanity?
Is it fuck… He gives up because he’s tired, just like the rest of us baddies.
There is a lot of running around in this flick, so much so that you think it matters. And they do it for like a hundred and 40 minutes, which would be okay if it actually built to the ending Spielberg imagines he built up to.
Dear reader… it does not.
I do actually urge people to watch this film. I’m serious. It’s not a good film, and hell, whacking yourself on the foot with a hammer would probably be a better way to spend two and a half fucking hours, but I implore people to do it and ignore all the strange implausibilities that having nothing to do with aliens or magic powers or anything along the way: I want them to watch the ending and come up with their own honest opinion as to what would happen.
The world we live in, if it lived through the ending of this flick for reals, would shrug its shoulders, roll over and fart, and then go back to sleep or scrolling on its fucking phone or streaming season 2 of Heated Rivalry or Emily in Paris and reading romantasy and true crime in the bath like nothing had happened, because a third of us would watch it and think it was bullshit, a third would watch it and be convinced it was true and proof that the world was flat all along and the moon landing was faked (and vaccines kill!), and the other third wouldn’t give a fuck because they don’t care about anything beyond their patch of concerns anyway.
5 times if aliens ever invade, do you think they’ll attack Steven Spielberg first out of 10?
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“Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know” – okay, if you say so - Disclosure Day
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