Here’s A Disclosure: Steven, You Did This Already!
By
Leonard Zwelling
My former boss Irv Krakoff used to say often after evaluating someone’s work: “What is good isn’t new, and what is new isn’t good.”
In Steven Spielberg’s current film “Disclosure Day,” very little is either new or good. In fact, other than the opening half hour, this is a snore of a chase movie about the government hiding evidence of extraterrestrial life having landed on Earth for the past 80 years. (And from this film, you have to wonder why the aliens always landed in the United States.)
This has got to be the most derivative movie Spielberg has ever made and it is mostly a tribute to himself. When you start doing that in any profession, it may be time to hang it up. As a friend has said, “The Rolling Stones today are really a tribute band to themselves.” When was the last really good Rolling Stones album? “Some Girls?”
Steven Spielberg made one too many alien films and the last good one was over forty years ago (“ET”). “Disclosure Day” is a tribute to his younger self.
The reviews in the newspapers and on-line were all over the place, thus I had to make up my own mind by seeing the movie in a real theater. After all, this is the new film by the man who made “Jaws,” the Indiana Jones films (2 out of the 5 were good), “Schindler’s List” (probably his most important film), “Saving Private Ryan” (best opening sequence in history), and “Munich” (my favorite Spielberg film).
In the first half hour, I thought this was going to be a great film. Then, it fell off a cliff into a split screen buddy movie where the two pairs of protagonists rush toward each other for the inevitable climax which was neither surprising nor particularly interesting.
Spielberg did set this up well by framing the film in our world with countries plunging toward World War III. That part seemed of interest even as it mirrored the plot of “Arrival,” a far superior alien film. There are many shots straight out of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “ET,” and even “Minority Report.” As I said, this is Spielberg’s tribute to himself. As usual, Spielberg’s aliens have big heads, big eyes, and slim bodies. Why he thinks extra-terrestrial life will have bodies that mirror our own, is never made clear in any of his films.
One critic did mention that the sense of wonder that imbued “Close Encounters” and “ET” was missing from this film. Absolutely true. The only wonder is me wondering why he made this. If the last line of the film is the payoff, it falls pretty flat as well as awfully preachy.
Furthermore, as we get to see the government film archives documenting the 80 years of alien visits to the Midwest and southwest (these aliens never seem to go to Florida), hundreds of people are seen sifting through the wrecked spaceships and other alien detritus. All of these people kept the secret? Even in the age of the Internet? Ha!
Throughout my life I have had moments when I knew I was no longer able to do what I could a year or two before. My sub-seven-minute marathon pace at age 33 was long gone by age 48, but even at 36 during a shorter race on the National Mall, I was overtaken by a girl in the sprint to the finish line. I was sure my running career was soon to be over thereafter. Besides, running just hurt too much.
Even as I was publishing research results using new molecular technology in the late 1980s, I knew my research career was coming to an end. I didn’t like molecular biology like I had loved biochemistry and if you weren’t doing molecular biology in the late 1980s, you were not getting funded or published. I had proven what I set out to prove when I started my own lab in Houston. There was nothing left to do. That’s when I went to business school and soon thereafter my research career was over.
My administrative career started after business school (1993), and was ended for me once Dr. Kripke retired (2007), and Dr. DuBois had no use for me; until he did when I returned from my Washington, D.C. fellowship (2008-2009) and he needed me to steer the Carcinogenesis Department in Smithville past a financial and interpersonal scandal into new leadership. This is also when my health policy editorial writing and lecturing began. Something else new for a few years.
My MD Anderson career ended shortly thereafter though (2013). I was contributing nothing and had better things to do. (See the ‘books published’ section of this web site. These would never have gotten written had I not been “retired.”)
In each of these cases I set out to do something, then I did it, then I was gone. In essence, I had reached my “sell by date.”
With “Disclosure Day” Spielberg shows that while he may have more good films in him (yet to be proven), they should not be alien movies. He made two of the greatest and a few others as well (e.g., “War of the Worlds”). Now he’s made one of the worst.
As Clint Eastwood said as Dirty Harry in “Magnum Force,” “a man’s got to know his limitations.” Spielberg’s were two great alien films. Not three. Not more. Please.
