Disclosure Day – Once upon a time there was cinema

The filmmaker’s thirty-sixth feature film seems to be based on a misunderstanding. In the director’s work, the extraterrestrial has generally embodied a figure of reconciliation, of communion. For the young Spielberg, the trauma of the separation of his parents very early found in this imagery a cathartic outlet: a function analyzed and documented over the course of decades, and recognized by the filmmaker himself.

The genesis of this Spielbergian imagination, long integrated into the collective unconscious, was recently taken up in The Fabelmans(2023), poignant film but perhaps too diligent and self-aware. On the unveiling of his intimate universe, E.T. (1982), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), even AI Artificial Intelligence(2001), we seem to touch on a deeper autobiographical truth. In fact, it was first and foremost through science fiction that the filmmaker excelled at warding off his hauntings and celebrating the magical wedding of instinct and reason, art and technique – in other words: the figure of the mother and the figure of the father.

Exception notable : War of the Worlds (2005), point of convergence of individual and collective emotions marked by the post-September 11 trauma. Beyond the material devastation: a devastation of childish innocence. Hence a summary of spectacle and terror, set in one of the most astonishing settings ever deployed by Spielberg – whatever one may think of the clumsy literality of the adaptation of the novel by Herbert George Wells.

In this context, Disclosure Day produces the effect of a loop that closes, but also of a regression. How can the filmmaker, explicitly aware of the role of the alien in his creation, be able to act with such innocence as if nothing had been deconstructed? And deliver to a now jaded public a story of paranoia where intimate concerns and collective realities telescope and then coincide as if by magic? The narrative arc seems to belong to another era, that of the series X-Files in the 1990s. Its apparent naivety is all the more striking when we remember the new archetypes appearing on the big screen in recent years. InPremier Contact (Denis Villeneuve, 2016), in particular, the Spielbergo-Kubrickian matrix was updated with remarkable visual rigor and conceptual subtlety, not excluding, on the contrary, humanity and emotion.

The source of this regression: perhaps, at the twilight of his career, the wish of an old man to return to the source. Understandable and touching wish. Especially since it is exercised not by a gesture of selfish withdrawal, but by a generous spectacle, producing sequences where the spatial and dramaturgical sense of the Hollywood veteran works wonders. For 2h20, the eighty-year-old filmmaker seems to pulse with a desperate desire to stay in the race. Race for popularity and the spectacular, that the author ofJaws (1975) and the series Indiana Jones has itself been driven and nourished for half a century. And which inevitably, one day or another, the passage of time will have to put an end to (this decline, at least at the box office, already began more than ten years ago).

However, between Hitchcockian heritage and blockbuster aspirations, the film does not quite deliver on its promise of a great spectacle. Certainly, the shimmering of the photograph by Janusz Kaminski gives relief to the most banal settings. Added to this are ample camera movements and a saturation of reflections and screens typical of the author. But overall, on a formal level, Disclosure Day remains behind other Spielberg films, notablyMinority Report (2002), with which echoes abound: frantic chases, conspiratorial violence, the role of aliens assigned to precogs, and a shattered childhood, summoned by a family home receptacle of memories where perhaps the most fragile part of Spielbergian sentimentalism pulses. As such, the sequences of the reconstruction of the childhood pavilion of the character played by Emily Blunt are among the most beautiful in the director’s recent work. It’s difficult not to think ofNostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983) (except that an abandoned warehouse replaces the ruined cathedral) and more at Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014) (where Spielberg was originally involved). Main singularity, which the viewer will be free to be moved, make fun of or get tired of: the animal imagery and the resumption of a famous nursery rhyme directly summon one of the filmmaker’s most founding inspirations – namely Walt Disney.

We can deplore that with Disclosure DaySpielberg no longer explores new territories for him, like his last two feature films, West Side Story(2021) et The Fabelmans. It is in the light of one’s own filmography that one must appreciate this new film in order to overcome its naivety, and to understand the extent to which a tendency underlying all of his work flourishes: mysticism. And even spirituality. turns out to be childish, non-dogmatic, and no less fervent, as if in our time, faced with looming global tragedies, no other way out than this return to faith was offered to individuals, nor to society. Should we see this as an effect of age and the approach of death on a director who remained a child for a long time. gifted but overtaken by time – even though his legendary visual virtuosity and playful verve persist, more vivid than in many of his younger colleagues? In this gap lies one of the hiatuses which make the film as uneven as it is fascinating.

Obviously, the inexhaustible need for a belief – in images, a human ideal, even a divinity – permeates the work of the most popular director of the last fifty years. As a bonus, a mixture of panache and melancholy creeps in here. The indestructible Spielbergian optimism may have lived but the human warmth persists. The declared faith in empathy is perhaps too much proclaimed, too much theorized: its sincerity is however not in doubt (so many points in common, here too, with Interstellar).

We still don’t know ifDisclosure Day will assert itself or not as a major piece of the Spielbergian corpus. At least there appears to be a moving extension, which for the first time organizes the shift from vision – a primitive, sacred act, involving terror and wonder – towards the even more human act of speaking and listening. To believe that fifty-four years of career and thirty-six feature films were not too much for this beautiful and simple gesture to finally come to fruition, in full frame.