Unless you like your alien flicks very accessible (e.g., “Aliens in the Attic,” Steven Spielberg’s own “E.T.”), you probably go to such films expecting plenty of weird elements. But the marketing for Spielberg’s upcoming sci-fi thriller “Disclosure Day” has been so perplexing that the movie in question may well greatly surpass the likes of “Signs,” “Nope,” “Arrival,” and Spielberg’s own “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” for sheer bizarreness. Since the two-minute official teaser released back in December made “Disclosure Day” seem like such a head-scratcher of a film, it’s no surprise that this past Sunday’s Super Bowl TV spot was not much more enlightening.
One Reveal: A Government Conspiracy
The official teaser for “Disclosure Day,” released on Dec. 16, advertised it as a film about a remarkable secret, about which humankind deserves “full disclosure” and which contains within it the fact that, per the title of a bestselling SETI book from the 1960s, we are not alone. Its strangeness lay in how it seemed to combine some very different genres inexplicably: clips showing crop circles and dialogue about humanity’s not-aloneness revealed it as a film about extraterrestrial contact, while it also showed scenes of action resembling a conspiracy thriller, and a Disney-looking scene in which a stag and a cardinal enter a child’s bedroom.
While “Disclosure Day’s” roughly one-minute Super Bowl trailer largely consists of recycled material from the previous ad, it does contain one new and very revealing line of dialogue: a news reporter announces on television that “there has been a threat to publicly release government material long shrouded in secrecy.” So, there we have it: at least one major government on this planet has been suppressing knowledge of extraterrestrial life. The titular “Disclosure Day” will come when a few determined individuals make good on their threat, which, for some reason, will evidently involve a fair number of action-film vehicular stunts.
On a slightly more eerie note, alien contact also seems to entail having electrodes placed on one’s temples, then experiencing something that causes one’s pupils to expand and contract. We see this happen to two separate characters, and the visual immediately calls to mind numerous comic-book-superhero transformations and the ending of Alex Garland‘s trippy sci-fi horror flick “Annihilation,” in which a mysterious shimmering prism-realm exerts a bizarre and terrifying effect on the human body and mind. We can only guess what kind of effects the aliens in “Disclosure Day” will have on humans.
The Mystique Makes Judgment Hard
Does “Disclosure Day” look like a film that the great Spielberg will be able to put on the same proud shelf as “Jaws,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and so forth? Or, at the very least, like a film that we’re likely to enjoy and/or appreciate? The very mystifying nature of the trailer makes this an inherently difficult question to answer.
Its strangeness certainly arouses a degree of curiosity that not many ads can hope to provoke, but one also can’t help wondering how well its diverse – perhaps even dissonant – elements will mesh together. How will potboiler-worthy car chases fit into a story that, in every other aspect, seems to aspire to quiet profundity? What sorts of profound themes will this story reach for? What in all the vast universe is the deal with the deer and the bird that enter a kid’s bedroom at night like fairy-tale characters? (The large herd of deer shown outside a house at the beginning of the full-length teaser has a Jordan Peele-esque creepiness about it).
The answers to these questions may well make the difference between a masterpiece and a rare Spielbergian misstep. Needless to say, these are only the two ends of a broad spectrum. We’ll have to wait until June 12 to find out.
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