Disclosure Day Review: Steven Spielberg’s Imperfect Triumph

There is a specific kind of pleasure that comes from watching a master work. Not the thrill of surprise, not the breathless excitement of discovering something new, but the deep, almost involuntary comfort of watching someone who simply knows what they’re doing better than almost anyone alive.

Disclosure Day is not Steven Spielberg’s best film and wouldn’t even crack his top ten. But sitting in the dark watching him do what he does, you feel the weight of that half-century of craft in every frame, and that alone is worth the price of admission.

Spielberg returning to alien territory could have been comfort food with familiar wonder and awe. Disclosure Day is darker than that: A cybersecurity whistleblower and a meteorologist find themselves at the centre of a global conspiracy, and the film’s central question isn’t what’s out there, but whether humanity deserves to know. It’s a question Spielberg has been circling since Close Encounters and E.T., and he still hasn’t tired of asking it. The difference here is the urgency, and this time it feels less like wonder and more like a reckoning.

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