On the run, hunted by a powerful paragovernmental agency, computer scientist Daniel (Josh O’Connor) has a mission to accomplish. Inhabited by powers that she discovers and does not understand, TV presenter Margaret (Emily Blunt) rushes towards an unknown destination. Two tense trajectories which, beyond the dangers and trials, must meet and organize the 37e feature film by Steven Spielberg (79 years old).
Around this double race, a maelstrom of technology, special effects, sentimentalism and shocking scenes. It’s rhythmic and effective, with the impression of having seen almost all of this before… in films by the same American director.
Hollywood did not need to wait for artificial intelligence (AI) to infinitely rearrange what was in its “databases”, long before computers. And if the tenors of American cinema are now embracing AI, Steven Spielberg is a human intelligence quite capable of recycling its own story elements and ways of filming without the help of any algorithm.
It is often said that the real authors always say the same thing. This isn’t always true, but it can be. “Telling the same thing” then means that at the heart of each singular work there is an active principle which is permanent. But if it is indeed an author, which Steven Spielberg certainly is, everything plays out precisely in the fruitful singularity of each scenario and each staging based on this active principle.
Disclosure Dayhis new achievement, seems far from the mark in this regard. The entire film never ceases to summon the memory of other feature films by the same filmmaker, whether it be the dramatic mechanisms, the adventures or the ways of filming them. There is a gap between coherence and repetition, which this time is what dominates.
The music of John Williams, Steven Spielberg’s favorite composer, also contributes to this effect of repetition, which notably summons the memory of Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), but covers the entire filmography, since Duel (1971) – with the attack on the road by a large vehicle in front of a level crossing –, when the sequel looks towards Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
These ways of filming depend on the expertise of the director to produce spectacular or moving effects. Nothing to say, it still works. Pursuit, pileup, difficult choices, astonishing special effects do the job, without preventing a feeling of standing still, in terms of staging.
The actor as special effect
The only truly new element in the entire film in this respect is that we find within this panoply the unprecedented presence of what British actor Josh O’Connor brings to the lead role. He is a sort of special effect all by himself, out of step with the great machinery in which his character takes place. Even without saying anything, even without doing anything, it appears as the promise of other ways of filming – but that won’t happen.
There is indeed a “Spielberg style” and this reigns over the formal choices of the film, among which the actor stands out in a way that we may find delightful. These formal choices are in perfect harmony with the dramatic springs that we also find in a large number of the films of the signatory of AND the alien (1982).
Or, first of all, the family as a fundamental and unsurpassable entity, but also the evocation of an idealized, not to say “Disneyized” childish imagery, the summoning of the relationship to fiction and the reassuring and simplifying invisible, the mobilization of extraterrestrials as a saving otherness.
Yet within this great warehouse of déjà vu arises what seems a relatively new motif, not that it has been entirely absent previously in Steven Spielberg’s work, but not having occupied such a central place. This is the function attributed to religion, Christian in this case, with a significant role attributed to the mother superior of a convent, even if she is rarely present on screen.
A sort of revelation
This dimension gives a curious color to what the trajectory of the film tends towards and what the title designates. The term “disclosure” seems to point towards the need for transparency, the literal translation would be “disclosure”, a subject to which the author of Pentagon Papers (2017).
And in fact, people keep repeating that seven billion humans have the right to know what the (US) government is hiding from them, an obviously honorable democratic concern. But it is also worked on by another approach, which is the singularity of this new production by the soon-to-be octogenarian filmmaker.
This approach would be suggested by a translation of the title closer to what the film constructs than the literal (and ugly) translation. Instead of “day of disclosure”, it would be “day of Revelation”, with the capital letter and the religious (monotheistic) dimension attached to this word.
After briefly mobilizing this new dimension, Steven Spielberg carefully puts it away in a drawer. This is a far cry from M. Night Shyamalan’s otherwise complex mediation on the effects of beliefs on collective life.
The most unique issue of Disclosure Day is thus activated by the young woman named Jane (Eve Hewson), the companion of the hacker on the run, a character who literally imposes herself – and against all likelihood – in the course of his adventures. A fervent Catholic, she worries about the effects of this profane revelation that Daniel wants to implement.
She sees it as a catastrophic threat to the importance of faith. Not just one’s own Christian faith, but the belief in an invisible transcendence as a resource for humans to endure existence. She does not say that God, the God of Christians, exists, although she is surely convinced of it, she says that humans need to believe.
Jane is terrified by the effects of calling into question the perception of a world order, of a cosmogony, when the film pleads for the hypothesis that humanity has everything to gain from it. More than all the other protagonists, who are each well stuck on their line of action, and although a “secondary character”, she is the epicenter of what the film questions.
Or rather pretends to question. Because Steven Spielberg, after having briefly mobilized this new dimension, carefully puts it away in a drawer. We are a long way from the otherwise complex mediation of M. Night Shyamalan on the effects of beliefs on collective life, including with the resources of spectacular cinema.
A dated belief in the power of images
Let no one doubt it, it is better to tell the truth than to hide it. We are well advanced… Not on the principles, but on the means to implement them.
In Disclosure Daydisclosure, revelation, or even (this also works) annunciation occurs through images. With regard to the place of the word in the three revealed religions, this is a big subject, dismissed without further ado. Above all, today we may find this confidence in the power of the visible problematic, at a time when images are affected by a generalized doubt, which invalidates the belief in an effect of certainty in the face of what the screens show.
Where we find what we had already seen in the author, notably from Ready Player One (2018): a dated conception of the relationships between reality and images and, a fortiori, of the power of a “revelation”, on the scale of all humanity, through this old media that is now television.
Leading filmmaker of the 20th centurye century, Steven Spielberg glimpsed something new at the dawn of the 21ste with AI Artificial Intelligence in 2001 and especially Minority Report in 2002. Since then, he has returned to the past. We can see it as a limit, or why not, a choice.
But we can also see it as a worrying symptom. Disclosure Day is based on a political principle, the right of people to know. And Steven Spielberg is a leading figure of the democratic intelligentsia (in the sense of the American political party). Such a film incites fears that he, and worse, they, still do not know what century they live in and how it works.
