Disclosure Day
Another maudlin blockbuster from the man who invented them
Vintage Violence is a blog about film, literature, and more. A majority of the posts are free, but you can subscribe at a paid tier to access the entire back catalog. The following post contains my very negative thoughts on Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. It is for paid subscribers only.
I hate Steven Spielberg.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a generous handful of his movies. He’s probably a nice guy, too, but I think his filmography represents Lucifer’s labor of love. Only Satan is powerful enough to manipulate this many people, for this long, myself included. How could I not follow temptation and give in to a life of cinematic sin when Jaws, AI: Artificial Intelligence, Catch Me If You Can and Minority Report exist? These, and very few others, are reason enough to return to a filmmaker for each and every new release, even when the results are as infuriating as The BFG, Ready Player One, or my least-favorite film of the last decade, The Fabelmans. And so, despite writing my Anti-Spielberg Manifesto last year1, I took the bait on Disclosure Day. A back-to-basics genre story that he wrote on an iPad (before Disposable David Koepp polished the screenplay) should be the ideal playground for a filmmaker such as Spielberg, whose depictions of childlike awe have become treacly, but whose camerawork often retains that same feeling he now fails to evoke in his actors and audience. Contrary to some generous auteurist claims that this picks up where Close Encounters of the Third Kind left off, Disclosure Day feels all too tied to his recent work, particularly the ineffectual The Post and the aforementioned, abhorrent, abysmal The Fabelmans.
