Loving Aliens

I recently watched Disclosure Day, the latest Spielberg movie about aliens. He’s directed five, or six, if you include his student-days short. It moves at a terrific pace and reaches the (must-have) climax and resolution at the end. It has reasonable reviews, though not outstanding ones (see below). And one can understand why. IMHO, the plot is bonkers, but then again, perhaps all such alien-encounter movies are equally bonkers. In contrast, the speculative (science) fiction literature is much more nuanced and thoughtful about what it would mean to encounter an alien, ranging from its death to that of the humans involved, with such confrontations being peaceful versus warlike in equal measure.

“If you meet an alien, smile.”

The above is my working title for a not-too-serious short story about an alien encounter. But I digress.

What has gone wrong with DD is the focus on action at the expense of character development and their arcs as events unfold plus Spielberg’s own views coming into play.

A big thing was made of Jane’s faith and her torment and worry that disclosing that aliens had landed on earth would shatter everyone’s faith and lead to some disaster. But she’d seen the evidence, so her own faith was compromised (but wasn’t!), and she was a novice who had rejected becoming a nun. It just didn’t add up. She had faith but not that of being part of a faith community. Yet, she goes there for help and later advice from the mother superior. It just doesn’t feel right. Nor is her concern for how the faithful would react.

I could go on about the other characters. As such, the best-portrayed character is Miss Shepherd, whose journey makes a kind of sense. As for Daniel, he’s just a bag carrier (literally).

What could have been done to improve the story and give the characters appropriate motivations?

For Daniel, we needed a better prompt to make him a renegade. He switches sides, but we’re not shown this or why what he saw changed his view of his employer, the (tick-the-box) secret government agency that holds the secret of the aliens’ presence. (Trope alert!)

It’s not clear why Jane held the views that are so central to her actions in the movie. She gets a lot of airtime, then vanishes until she appears just at the right moment (yeah!) to save the disclosure. IMO, she’s a cypher for Spielberg’s decision to cover the religious aspect of what the existence of aliens would do to people’s faith. But the story would have worked just as well, and possibly better, if this had all been left out, or touched upon indirectly. If Jane hadn’t considered her faith central to who she was, it might have allowed Jane and Daniel to see this as a potential obstacle to disclosure in a more meaningful way.

One could go on about how the script should have been written. In essence, the ratings given to the movie (Rotten Tomatoes: critics, 79%; viewers, 69%; IMDb 6.4/10; Metacritic 74/100) reflect these and other weaknesses. The ending is an issue in my view, but to avoid spoilers, I won’t go into this.

To conclude. There’s a strong feeling of Spielberg wanting to get some of his own convictions into the movie (he has a thing about aliens and would, it seems, dearly like to see them or at least get evidence of their existence) at the expense of plot integrity and character development. A pity. For the idea that the U.S. government is withholding information is a current theme, what with the release of the Pentagon’s and State Department’s files on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. And perhaps leaving their existence ambiguous at the movie’s end?