I love when Colin Firth gets to be the bad guy. In Steven Spielberg’s new movie, “Disclosure Day,” Firth plays the head of a sinister agency trying to stop Josh O’Connor’s character from revealing the existence of aliens. The movie has all the makings of a classic summer blockbuster: big names, big story, big budget, big effects. But will it deliver? Our critic Justin Chang, who reviewed “Disclosure Day,” answers a few of my questions about the movie and its seventy-nine-year-old director, whom Chang calls “one of the few film artists left who can still command the resources of a major studio.”
Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
The plot of this film seems to have been kept intentionally mysterious, even as the subject of U.F.O.s has been prominent in the news cycle (thanks, Obama). Does Spielberg know something we don’t?
Spielberg is known to be a longtime believer in alien life, and he’s cited a 2017 investigative report on sightings of U.F.O.s and U.A.P. (unidentified anomalous phenomena) as a major inspiration for “Disclosure Day.” So, perhaps he does! That said, the movie also features telepathy, mind-control devices, shape-shifting technology, and a massive digital cloak of invisibility, so, you know, grains of salt.
How does “Disclosure Day” rank among the director’s other alien movies?
Gladly leaving out “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” I’d rank “Disclosure Day” dead last, I’m afraid. But there’s no shame in that, given the competition. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.” are undisputed classics, and “War of the Worlds,” until it goes awry in the final stretch, is one of Spielberg’s most terrifying, grandly despairing visions. In a sense, “Disclosure Day” is undone by its own ambitions. It wants to marry the beaming optimism of “Close Encounters” and “E.T.” with the near-apocalyptic darkness of “War of the Worlds,” and it winds up waffling.
Spielberg has worked through times of national pessimism and optimism in the course of the past half century. The current mood is leaning pretty dark; does the movie share that cynical, doomer feeling?
It tries to, with some almost comically vague, half-hearted allusions to geopolitical turmoil offscreen. (I remember a lot of references to North Korea and not much else.) The reason the aliens have to be kept from the public, apparently, is entirely cynical and doomy: humans are both too arrogant and too divided a species to be able to deal with the truth, and our world would descend into chaos. The movie tries to reverse this pessimism at the end, with a climactic appeal to empathy and the better angels of our nature. I didn’t find either the blanket pessimism or the blanket optimism convincing.
You write in your review that this is an “American road movie.” What did you mean?
The lead characters spend most of the movie on the run, hiding out in safe houses, switching modes of transport, etc. It’s worth noting that Spielberg kicked off his feature career with two road movies, “Duel” and “The Sugarland Express.” Pauline Kael, writing about the latter in this magazine, said, “Spielberg is a choreographic virtuoso with cars. He patterns them; he makes them dance and crash and bounce back. He handles enormous configurations of vehicles; sometimes they move so sweetly you think he must be wooing them.” The same is true in “Disclosure Day.”
What do you make of the religious overtones in the movie?
As someone who, in his church-going youth, used to wonder if my God was the God of all the other planets and alien civilizations, too, I found the religious themes to be among the film’s most fascinating and moving elements. Especially in light of a recent Times article noting how many conservative Christians feel disturbed—or, rather, their geocentric world view feels disturbed—by the idea of alien life. It may be on the nose, but I loved the scene in which a nun (Elizabeth Marvel) says that her faith isn’t threatened by the existence of aliens. No worthwhile faith would be.
“Impossible to sleep. Still vibrating from the Knicks’ impossible comeback against the Spurs in Game Four.” Our editor, David Remnick, stayed up late to put down some thoughts on the Knicks’ astonishing comeback from twenty-nine points down to beat the Spurs. Earlier in the evening, he joined Vinson Cunningham and Louisa Thomas on Substack to make sense of the stunning scenes at Madison Square Garden, and to rank where the win stacked up in Knicks history.
Read Remnick’s piece and watch the conversation.
You can also purchase our Knicks cover, by Mark Ulriksen, to remember the team’s trip to the N.B.A. Finals. Get the cover »
When a small-town Indiana doctor was arrested on charges of recklessly prescribing narcotics, often in exchange for sex, his community and family were shocked. Then, during the criminal proceedings, he was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition, leaving his culpability in doubt. Adeline Goss investigates whether Howell’s disease was to blame. Read or listen to the story »
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P.S. When Spielberg’s “E.T.” was released, in 1982, Pauline Kael loved it. “Genuinely entrancing movies,” she wrote, “are almost as rare as extraterrestrial visitors.” 🚲
Austin Elias-de Jesus contributed to today’s edition.
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