In the summer of 1980 my dad took me, a seven year old child, to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That movie changed my perspective on life, I truly believed that we were not alone and that they were here as benevolent superior beings. I have watched that movie about 20 times in my life at various stages and the last time I watched it was when I showed it to my children after watching the 2023 congressional hearings on UAPs.
Close Encounters, even after seeing it 20 times, is a film that you can watch over and over again. The reason is that it is a visual experience as well as a great story where everything leads to the final scenes where you are presented with the truth about “them”. It feels more like a fly on the wall documentary rather than a film. The characters are not the focus of the movie but rather a conduit to the the story and supplemental to make the brilliant cinematography feel to human scale.
Even if you take the most inconsequential scene to the story, when the Neary family are all around the table trying to decide if to play crazy golf or go an watch Pinocchio at the cinema, even that scene you are grabbed and pulled into the chaos of that family and the story.
I think a lot of it has to do with the limitations of filming technology of the time, for example:
- The sound is more global as the boom microphones picked up all the sounds in the room as well as the actors voices making it feel more real to the ears.
- Because the cameras were analogue with stock film, the shots feel more authentic and less “researched” (with digital you have take after take and unlimited cuts breaking that natural flow of imperfections that you get with fewer takes and cuts).
- The effects are mostly real set lights and stage props.
- The creativity needed by the film makers to surpass the technological limitations.
Spielberg himself said that if Bruce the shark worked perfectly as he intended then Jaws would have been a very different film (and not as good).
My children are Gen Z and still they find 2001 A space odyssey, Close Encounters and Blade Runner more “authentic” than all the films produced post 2010 (with the exception of Interstellar probably).
Anyway enough about my rantings about modern film making and lets talk about Disclosure Day.
When I heard about the project and that Steven was doing it, obviously my expectations were huge. Then the trailer came out and my instant reaction was “ho god its going to be about car chases and characters”. But in an interview with Spielberg he did say that they left out the “wow” from the trailer which gave me some hope.
Yesterday, Friday the 12th of June 2026, I went to see it. The cinema was packed, you could feel the excitement and expectation of the auditorium. There were people of all ages.
As the movie started it was straight in with the wrestling POV and then go into the main character where he has the bag with the secret recordings and some “government” people trying to take it from him. Straight away my senses were “this doesn’t make sense”, what is the purpose of the wrestling match and why would he be there, I realise that it might have been because the “government” people wanted a public place to make an exchange – but that didn’t feel logical or natural.
And then the movie proceeds with the first chase. Who cares!…what’s in the bag?…why isn’t the character of Eve Hewson more freaked out and questioning what this is all about. Again this didn’t feel natural but scripted. In Close Encounters we are introduced to the the movie by the character of François Truffaut going to a windy desert scene where they find the navy planes that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in the 40’s. This instantly sets the tone of the movie both visually, style and most importantly what the story is about.
Disclosure Day sets a very different tone, its about the characters, them being chased and their state of mind. Very little to do with Alien Disclosure and visuals that explain the objective of the story.
This was very obvious in the reaction of the audience. Throughout the movie you could hear the rattling of ice as they drink, the crunching of popcorn, coughing and the usual moving about. People were watching as if they were streaming it at home, there was no “grabbing of attention”, there was no “capturing and captivating” of the audience it was just watching a decent movie but meh…when is the good stuff coming.
And then it did. Towards the end after, what felt like hours, they start streaming on news channel the footage that was being disclosed. For those 10 minutes you could hear a pin drop. Every audience member was there watching the screen as if it was real footage. This was what the whole movie was supposed to be about. Yes yes yes….finally we get Bruce (the shark in Jaws).
And this was the problem with the film. I think that when clips are put on YouTube, the most viewed will be these sequence of all the alien footage.
When the film ended and the lights came on you could see bemusement in peoples faces, very few words were said. Take that in contrast with the euphoria people felt after Close Encounters or even, to bring it to more recent films, Interstellar, where when the lights came on everyone was enthusiastically talking about it.
As we walked out of the cinema my wife commented “I guess you were right, too many car chases!”
This is where I think Spielberg missed an opportunity. Disclosure Day could have been a “documentary” to bring people up to speed with what has happened in the last 70 years since Roswell.
If the movie had been more like an escalation of information over the decades then it would have made more sense and drawn the audience in. I appreciate that 2 hours is not enough and maybe Disclosure Day would have been better suited to be a trilogy or a 10 part mini series. But in the end it was nothing spectacular. There was no real buildup to “Bruce” or the “Mothership” coming down. Those 10 minutes of footage being shown on global TVs was the movie, the rest was inconsequential to the title.
I’m sorry to write this as my disappointment was not so much that Disclosure Day wasn’t giving us the definitive answers, I wasn’t expecting that of course, but I was expecting a film that would whisk me away for two hours into a story about the interactions with the aliens over the years, the government conspiracies but most importantly drag me in and feel part of the cast.
I was expecting to come out of it feeling euphoric, like I do every time I watch Close Encounters. Instead I came out of it feeling like what was the point of this.
Close Encounters had the “Re, Mi, Do, Do, So”….Disclosure Day had “Blah, Blah, Ooooh, Blah, Blah”
