Disclosure Day: Spielberg on the borders of reality (review)
The soon-to-be octogenarian filmmaker takes Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor into his obsession with extra-terrestrials and signs his riskiest film in a long time.
Steven Spielberg never stopped looking at the sky. If we except War of the WorldsSince Encounters of the Third Kind extraterrestrials have always represented a promise for him: that of an elsewhere capable of re-enchanting the world. With Disclosure Daythe filmmaker therefore returns to his first loves. But we understand from the start that something has changed. The dream of the 70s is gone. Flying saucers no longer appear in a starry sky but in the saturated world of continuous news channels, declassified military videos and social networks.
On paper, it’s quite simple. Disclosure Day initially announces itself as an old-fashioned paranoid thriller. Stubborn journalists, secret archives, untraceable witnesses, federal agents and buried documents: for more than two hours, the film moves with formidable efficiency. In all his interviews (and in the fantastic special series First available this Wednesday on newsstands) Spielberg quotes Pakula, The three days of the condorand we even think of Hitchcock. The staging is insolently fluid (he always films car chases like no other). At almost eighty years old, he continues to move the camera with an ease that leaves the competition at a good distance. Each sequence has its visual discovery, each pursuit its staging idea. Rest assured: the outstanding filmer is still there!
The film also clearly resonates with the times. More than the extraterrestrials themselves, it is our relationship to the truth that interests Spielberg. In a world where institutions no longer convince anyone, where governments hide as much as they reveal, where everyone constructs their own reality from blurry images and fragments of information, for a long time ETs seem almost secondary. They are just a symptom. What seems to tell Disclosure Dayit is a society that has lost confidence in everything.
And this is precisely where the film gets complicated. Because Spielberg is not content with observing this contemporary fascination with unsolved mysteries. He also seems to share it. His last act is therefore a little destabilizing: he gradually abandons the position of observer to venture into much more ambiguous territory. Where the political thriller cultivated doubt, the final act seems to gradually give in to belief. The filmmaker takes the risk of looking at the imaginary Alien with absolute seriousness, to the point of blurring the line between wonder and credulity.
We can guess what attracts him. Spielberg has always been a filmmaker of faith: faith in childhood or in the imagination, belief in the possibility of discovering something greater than oneself. But in the age of fake news and digital conspiracies, this gesture no longer has quite the same meaning. Where Encounters of the Third Kind opened a door to the unknown, Disclosure Day sometimes flirts with stories of which we are no longer sure whether he questions them or whether he validates them. This is what prevents the film from being completely convincing. But that’s also what makes it exciting.
We should not forget the actors. Emily Blunt is insane. She plays a possessed weather presenter with ease and authority and above all the right amount of irony to support the spectacle of the world collapsing around her. Each time she enters a scene, the film gains energy and humor. As for Josh O’Connor, he seems to have been born for the late Spielberg. He seems constantly overwhelmed by events without ever losing the spectators’ attention. Hero of fragility, doubt and curiosity, he is the embodiment of this funny film.
A work that is sometimes virtuoso, often contradictory, sometimes disturbing, Disclosure Day is arguably Spielberg’s riskiest film in a long time. But certainly one of the rare recent blockbusters to accept getting lost in the gray areas of its era rather than pretending to illuminate them.
