I don’t usually spend this much time on pop culture topics but I’m a big Spielberg fan and I’m going to see this tomorrow night so I was hoping it wasn’t a dog. The audience rating isn’t available yet but critics seem to think Disclosure Day is pretty decent. It currently has an 82% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes.
I’m not going to get into any spoilers because, frankly, I’d rather go into this without knowing the plot. Here’s what a few of the reviewers are saying:
Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” is one of those movies that sweeps you up from the start and rarely lets you down. A rollicking science-fiction adventure, it finds Spielberg revisiting a genre that he has populated with charming and horrifying extraterrestrials, genetically engineered dinosaurs and plugged-in psychics, and which has inspired some of his most popular and critical successes. The first time I watched the new movie, I scribbled I am having so much fun in my notebook. It was a nonsensical thing to write down as well as redundant. I didn’t need a reminder of the contact high that stayed with me after the credits.
Most overtly, “Disclosure Day” serves as a companion piece to “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the 1977 blockbuster which, two years after “Jaws,” solidified Spielberg’s status as a New Hollywood chart-buster. In the decades that followed, he began to broaden his horizons with self-consciously serious, weighty subjects in films that were greeted in some quarters as evidence of his maturity. Throughout, he also continued to return to science fiction, an elastic genre that allowed him to stick to familiar types, pet themes and narrative patterns even as he pushed himself yet further stylistically, technically and cosmically.
I was sort of hoping that this would have some connections to Close Encounters, which I saw in the theater when it came out. I’ve always loved that film and even took a side trip to the Devil’s Tower several years ago to see it, mostly because of the movie. I especially love RIchard Dreyfuss in that movie. I think it’s his best performance after Jaws.
Anyway, other reviews suggest it’s a bit wacky and fun, which a movie about aliens probably should be.
Steven Spielberg has been directing feature films for more than 50 years, and yet his work still has a sense of wonder: a glowing, almost innocent belief in the prospect of a better world, and a quiet reveling in the idea that there are things we do not, and perhaps cannot, understand.
His latest, “Disclosure Day,” lives in that space of the unknown. It mixes a few genres — science fiction, action, conspiracy thriller — with that trademark Spielbergian shimmer, and the result is the kind of smart summer movie that’s absolutely worth the overpriced popcorn. We are not alone, this movie tells us — not just referring to other worlds, but to this one, where a comforting hand to hold is always closer than we think.
There’s also a new John Williams score which is something to look forward to:
It’s all set to an old-school John Williams score, grand though not upbeat, that nostalgically brings to mind Indy and his dad escaping a Nazi castle in “The Last Crusade.” At 94 years old, Williams continues to understand what movie magic sounds like better than anybody who’s come after him or likely will…
Williams hasn’t retired yet. But should “Disclosure Day” mark his and Spielberg’s final collaboration — their 30th — the duo goes out as masters of their craft.
Of course not everyone is convinced. There are a few negative reviews but even some of these make it sounds good:
Ostensibly set in the present, with many grim, furrowed-brow references to a Third World War on the horizon, the film plays like a throwback to summer entertainments from earlier decades—and not just because the title evokes “Independence Day” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” two foundational science-fiction blockbusters of the nineties. Koepp’s screenplay samples everything from the sinister government conspiracies of “The X-Files” to the crop-circle mysteries of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs” (2002). There’s even a certain nostalgia, verging on naïveté, in the prominent narrative positioning of Margaret’s Kansas City news station. It’s touching to think that Daniel and Margaret’s revolution might be televised— or that American broadcast news, a medium as existentially threatened as it is politically polarized, might turn out to be a vital, globally unifying force.
My take is that when you have 80% of reviewers saying the film is fun and 20% saying it’s unrealistic, it’s the latter who are missing the point of going to the movies. Do you really need this to be fun and exciting and to exactly track with your views about media polarization? Can’t you just sit back and enjoy it a little? Do your politics have to always intrude on a harmless good time?
Honestly, I think liberals are especially bad at this because a) they have far less experience being confronted by movies and TV with ideas that don’t match their own and b) because they have socialized themselves to “call out” anyone who doesn’t fall in line. It’s tiresome and I wish they could just accept that not everything they encounter will please them 100%. Grow up and get over it.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing this tomorrow night. I don’t need it to tell me my politics are right. In fact, I’d rather politics be left on the cutting room floor. Just tell me an entertaining story with some fun action, good performances, a good soundtrack and maybe a couple of laughs. That’s enough. Few directors these days seem capable of doing that much.
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