In the song’s view, as in Spielberg’s, aliens can save us from our mistakes and should be welcomed. If you’ve seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., you already know how he feels about all that, and film pundits of today, tomorrow, and forevermore will have a field day combing through Disclosure Day to tease out threads from those movies, as well as Minority Report and several of the Indiana Jones installments. But to say that in Disclosure Day Spielberg is building on his favorite themes (extraterrestrials as friendly beings, the promises and threats of technology as we forge into the future) and his grand skills (for action sequences especially) is basically sounding the alert that water is wet. To think of movies as “explorations of themes” is to deaden them.
Besides, Disclosure Day feels not like a repetition but like a thunderclap culmination, the kind of movie you make when, at age 79, you’re not only at the peak of your skills, but you realize time is running out. What, exactly, do you want to say, and how do you find the pictures, the words? The pictures and words are all right there in Disclosure Day, an eleventh-hour plea to reconnect with all that makes us human, even if we need to invoke the help of imaginary aliens to do it. Spielberg has spoken freely about his belief in intelligent alien life, and he’d surely love to meet an extraterrestrial if the chance should arise. But Disclosure Day, more than a call to otherworldly occupants, is a starting place for everyone stuck here on Earth. As much as Spielberg would like to look to the stars for an answer, he knows there’s nowhere like home to start. It’s the place he phones first, hoping we’ll pick up.
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