by Brendan Connolly
*Warning – this review contains spoilers…”
Well I say that, but honestly this movie was spoiled in the studio. Disclosure Day is the latest movie directed by cryogenically preserved legend of cinema Steven Spielberg. And while it may seem impossible to make an expensive movie with no plot, no climax and characters that nobody cares about, this movie manages all this and more.
Disclosure Day is a story of pure idealism where the plot is built on the belief that “knowing the truth” will save humanity, perhaps proving that, in the neoliberal era in which Western economies are built on nothing more than bubbles and marketing, ideas are all that matters. It features a small cast of heroes busily working to preserve exactly the same world system, but with a little extra knowledge, a fitting idea in this world where one more swipe or scroll or snap is all most people have to look forward to.
Disclosure Day opens in a wrestling ring before we cut to a nervous looking man in the front row. It turns out he is carrying a backpack full of USB’s full of secret government data proving the existence of aliens, and because nobody bothered to back up this data anywhere, shady government blackshirts are there to take the backpack in exchange for his kidnapped girlfriend.
It’s minute three and already any half-intelligent viewer will wonder why the deep state chose a packed Wrestlemania stadium to collect sensitive information. Those with even a passing knowledge of CIA shenanigans will also wonder why our backpack-toting manboy was not just snatched and executed on his way to the exchange, if not earlier (this would have saved time for the viewer and perhaps been more satisfying). And as we cut to the back of an unmarked truck to observe the agents check the information by just counting the number of USB’s, questions will arise about whether this is in fact just very dry satire.
With the USB’s counted, the hostage is released, and our hero performs a sneaky trick – pulling out a small rod that freaks everybody out, and which we will soon discover is a special alien device that covers all plot holes. Our crew of deep state stooges is petrified that the rod might hit the deck so nobody thinks to shoot the hero in the face.
After our heroes escape to a convent (for real) and start talking about God, the audience will wonder if a movie that opens with wrestling then progresses to Jesus is an in-house MAGA production. Discussions of God, faith and how religion “holds civilizations together” continue to slide into the background of Disclosure Day in a way that would surely please the uncivilized madmen currently behind the wheel of the global accumulation machine. Our hero’s girlfriend even wonders if disclosing the alien data might ruin the world by exploding everyone’s faith in God, leading to the obvious conclusion that JD Vance had some notes on the original script.
The movie devolves from here into a bland and sometimes confusing chase movie in which the agents of the state are less Borne Identity badasses and more Scooby Doo villains. This is how I have to describe the characters because honestly I can’t remember any of their names. And this is the heartless centre of the film – the characters are so dull and the problems they face so mechanical that I didn’t care if any of them died.
The heroes want to publish the information, the government wants to suppress it, and as an audience member you have no preference, as long as it happens as quickly as possible. This is the core problem of the film, as well as what it reveals about bourgeois ideology. The problem is that just releasing information is not that compelling. The attempt to make knowing something a transformative event falls flat because as a viewer you know that it will make no difference to the material conditions of the world.
There are plot holes galore, from super high-tech superior aliens randomly crashing in the desert to the deep state being unable to stop a news station from broadcasting classified information. The state’s super-agents are numerous, bumbling, and forget to fire their high-powered weapons at anyone (nearly) throughout the whole movie. The state-funded terminators are willing to drive our heroes into the path of a freight train and to use explosives to cut the power to a TV station, yet they wait to find the right motel room before busting in to catch our heroes and are unable to enter the hero’s compound because the roller door is shut.
There are sneaky background mentions of rogue forces in The DPRK (which they of course call North Korea) taking over missile launchers and Russia threatening nuclear attacks, but our heroes show no interest in this. While background extras panic-buy water and freak out about nuclear holocaust the team of disclosers focuses on the much more important issue of publishing pictures of aliens before the end of life on Earth.
And maybe this is the crux of Hollywood’s problem, as illustrated by this movie. In a moment where US imperialism is experiencing a deep crisis of legitimacy in the eyes of the masses, they can no longer just wheel out Russian, Chinese or Arab bad guys threatening to destroy the world, but only lame deep-state spy-clowns trying to suppress a leak. Now that the US war machine has taken its mask off, perhaps only Marvel villains will be convincing.
All of this combines to show the degeneration of the capitalist cultural machine, which has been hollowed out by neoliberalism, and which is perhaps seen as less important since the collapse of the USSR.
The conspiratorially minded might even wonder if this was rushed out in to follow the recent release of Pentagon UFO files and add to the sense of distraction, they seemed designed to create. Otherwise, you might ask, what was the point of making this movie (aside from capital accumulation of course)?
It would not be the first time that Steven Spielberg’s work has served the ideological needs of empire. From Saving Private Ryan’s humanisation of the US war machine1 to Munich which…well…did the same thing for Israel.2 This is Hollywood’s role in the empire, to make entertainment that normalises atrocity without the audience noticing the trick. Spielberg, a founder of the Shoah Foundation, which aimed to frame the Palestinian resistance as an anti-Israeli holocaust, is deeply embedded in this system.34
Disclosure Day is another remake of a remake; a spin-off of a spin-off that went stale before the smartphone existed. It is bad propaganda, not the entertaining kind we used to get; as profound as a Trump tweet, as transformative as a real estate brochure and at best another piece of evidence that the cultural production of capitalism is as degraded as the rest of the system.
Disclosure Day gets a rating of 1 Hammer/sickle.
Footnotes
- Saving Private Ryan – whilst cast as an “anti-war movie” due to graphic portrayal of D-Day landing – however the 1998 film which included scenes of US soldiers executing unarmed prisoners of war was used to rehabilitate US military from “Vietnam Syndrome” by harking back to the “good war” of World War 2.
https://works.hcommons.org/records/bfrze-mt275 ↩︎ - Munich – supposedly by showing the “conflicted” Mossad agents who carried out extra-judicial killings of Palestinian resistance fighters linked to the Munich Olympics hostage taking of Israeli athletes – humanises Israels killing machine.
https://www.revisionisthistory.org/steinsaltz.html ↩︎ - He funded Shoah foundation with profits from Schindlers list, collecting testimony from Holocaust survivors. In 2024 – Shoah foundation announced it would be collecting testimony from Oct 7th survivors – thus equating Holocaust with Palestinian resistance.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/shoah-foundation-oct-7-testimonies-1.7143147 ↩︎ - https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/26/steven-spielberg-denounces-antisemitism-and-makes-first-comments-on-gaza ↩︎
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