Disclosure Day is a Deeply Immoral movie where even the aliens are stupid.

I saw Disclosure Day and it was easily the worst Steven Spielberg movie I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen plenty of much worse movies that were directed by someone else, and I also haven’t seen all of Spielberg’s movies, but still it was quite shocking that the same guy who directed Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Last Crusade, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, and Saving Private Ryan could make a movie this fundamentally flawed. It fails as a basic film and strays so far afield that it ends up promoting a deeply immoral message.[1]

Now I won’t bury the lead.  Spielberg and David Koepp (they are the only credited writers) present alien abductions as good things. This is at best just moral idiocy. To give you a more detailed explanation, I have to spoil the movie. But there also isn't a whole lot about this movie to spoil, as if you've seen the trailer and read the title, you know exactly what's going to happen. Nonetheless, if you don't want to know don’t read on.

The premise is that all or nearly all the rumors, stories, and conspiracy theories about aliens, crashed ships, abductions, etc are true, and a government organization has been hiding this information for nearly 80 years. Would be whistleblowers within that organization have ‘stolen’ data and files on the aliens and are trying to make it public . . . i.e. Disclosure Day. Around 90 to 95% of the movie is a cat and mouse game as the whistleblowers run away as the government agents move in.

But this movie is stupid and lazy as it doesn't even try to take its own premise seriously. When I described the premise to my 10-year-old daughter she said that it sounds like a good movie. And the concept does have a lot of meat. But the movie wastes this premise.

The really interesting idea behind a disclosure day is how the world, culture, our societies, governments, and even religions would or would not change and react. If it was undeniably obvious that alien life not only existed, but had visited the Earth, would society and our institutions collapse, or would we suddenly unite ala Star Trek or the X-Com games? That is a good question for a story to explore, and I’d really like to see some more stories with different takes on it. But Disclosure Day makes no serious effort to address that question. There is some throw away dialogue in the first act paying lip service to it, and that’s it. The “disclosure” happens at the end of the third act, and then the movie ends, before anyone or anything has time to process and react. That's just stupid and lazy. Imagine how much more interesting it would be if, say, Disclosure Day happened, and then it turned out almost nobody cared because we are too wrapped up in our phones, memes, and social media posts. Or maybe because the information comes through the news media, a significant amount of the population distrust it or think it’s all a lie. It’s unlikely a guy like Spielberg would embrace either of those messages, but at least that would be attempting to say something. This movie sets itself up as if it has profound and interesting things to say, and then when it has the chance to do so, it just ends. This is worse than the most annoying of cliffhangers as every structure of the movie has been building to that moment, but rather than let us have the moment, Spielberg cuts to credits. Perhaps if he had let that moment play out, I wouldn’t have liked his take on those interesting questions. But at least then the movie would have something to say that I could engage with. It ends up being very much like the worst of the continental philosophers and theologians who just refuse to say anything tangible that can be evaluated but then act like they have said truly profound things. There is a risk involved in actually showing a disclosure day play out, but it’s much better to take a risk that fails to pay off than actively refuse to say anything.

This movie also has a lot of bad writing and direction. Again I was absolutely shocked by this as no other Spielberg movie I’ve seen has this problem. He’s made some other movies that I didn’t enjoy or that I didn’t think worked very well, but none of them are lazy and stupid. This one is.

Here are some examples; the agents of the highly trained, secretive organization that's been keeping the existence of aliens and all the evidence under wraps for nearly 80 years is so incompetent that they don't even form perimeters around structures when pursuing people and all just stand around in gaggles waiting for orders. Barely trained patrol cops know better than to do that, much less supposedly highly trained secret agents. This one bothers me quite a bit because it's a mistake that's so easy to address by just having the actors pretend to do basic tactics. But no, they all pull up in black cars and then stand around and wait for somebody to tell them what to do. If I take this movie seriously then the existence of this organization is evidence of the existence of God and that He wants aliens to remain a secret because they're so horrifically incompetent that there's no way they kept the existence of aliens under wraps for 80 years unless God Himself was ensuring that it was so. You might think I'm exaggerating (and I did write that line because I think it's funny) but no, I'm not. That's really how bad this organization is at its only objective. Even if the bad guys having a basic concept of tactics wasn’t in the script, how did somebody not say to Spielberg or one the producers, “Wait, the bad guys look really dumb. Let’s have them move and react like actual soldiers or law enforcement to make them look like more of a threat.”

A key plot point in the first act is that the main villain can use an alien device to astral project into other people. He does this into the girlfriend of one of the two protagonists to locate them, and mind controls her to kill the protagonist. This fails, but he could do it again, so later she tells the protagonist to tie her up at night. However the villain does it again and uses her sight to find the address of the motel they are hiding at. Then he sends his agents to capture them. Given that his girlfriend is now a liability the protagonist should have left his girlfriend behind. You could maybe claim that he loves her too much to do that. The movie doesn’t show us that, but maybe that’s the case. But why didn’t the protagonist just blindfold her in addition to tying her up? That’s an easy and obvious solution.

And there's lots of things in the movie that are like this. There are many simple and completely obvious errors in storytelling that I’ve never seen in a Spielberg movie before.

As another example of these problems, they make Emily Blunt's character into a “Get out of jail free card” who can do whatever the plot requires. The more technical term for this is a Deus ex machina. This is when the writer has so painted his characters into a corner that they need the gods to come in and save them. Characters need to have agency, and having the gods come and save them ruins that. The story is breaking its own rules at that point. It’s like when my son wants to play a game where he makes up the rules as we go along. You can point to some exceptions where something like this works, but nearly all the time this is a bad thing, and it takes an exceptionally skilled writer to pull a Deus ex Machina off in a good way.

So at one point, the other lead protagonist is about to be captured. Suddenly, Emily Blunt just calls him and tells him what's going on. She just suddenly knows his name, phone number, and the fact that he’s about to be captured.  Later she just knows where he is being held prisoner, quotes the correct passcodes to the guards, and walks right into secure facilities. Everyone gets out of her way because when they look at her, they see another human being they have a strong emotional connection with. Somehow simply seeing a loved one overrides the free will of all of these supposedly highly trained government agents working for a black ops organization. These agents have apparently been dealing with aliens and alien related technology for years, and the context highly suggests that, “no, that's not your long dead wife, that's an illusion.” But no, they forget about that and everyone just gets out of the way for her. Why? The movie never bothers to explain or even hint at a consistent explanation because it's really just using her character to keep the plot moving instead of trying to do the interesting thing, which would be to establish what her new abilities are and what limits they have. Show her attempt to use them, fail, and then learn how to use them effectively in clever ways that give her character agency and make us want to root for her.

The explanation they try to give is that she can just know everything there is to know about a person and everything they know by looking at them. The problem is that even if you grant the movie this reality, it breaks that rule multiple times where Emily Blunt’s character knows things about people that she can't see and has never even met before. As a rule of thumb, a good story needs to have rules, even if it's about fantastic things like aliens giving you superpowers, and it needs to stick to those rules. Even Superman needs to be consistent. The trouble with get out of jail free card/ Deus ex machina characters and events like this is that they break those rules. This breaks immersion and makes it a bad story. A good story requires consistency and so when you introduce fantastic elements you need to also keep whatever rules there are for them consistent. You don't necessarily have to explain the rules to the audience. Sometimes it actually is better if you don’t (some mystery and unknowns can make a story better), but you at least have to be consistent. As with the above this is a rule of thumb as an exceptionally skilled writer can break this rule and have it work but it clearly didn’t work here.

See if you keep it really vague and don’t define what is going on you can just keep using Emily Blunt as your get out of jail free card. You wrote the story into a hole you can't get out of? Just have Emily Blunt's character show up and suddenly everything's fine because she walks in and everyone just does whatever the plot requires.  It's just lazy and stupid. And perhaps this is a side note but I've read quite a few philosophers and theologians who do similar things wherein they simply refuse to define what they mean and keep it very vague. Then as soon as people accuse them of being wrong, they whine that that's not what they really meant. But the problem isn't those other people; it is that those theologians and philosophers flat out refuse to say what they mean. See the nice thing about being very vague is it's then very difficult for anyone to turn around and claim that you're wrong because it gives you a lot of room to hide. And this problem functions similarly in story structure. Fail to define and make the rules of your story clear and then when you've got a problem you can just invent new things out of thin air and claim, “well I never said that's not the case!”

And the alien devices have the same issue. There are three alien devices that function as MacGuffins as well as get out of jail free cards. They also do whatever the plot requires. In the first act the villain uses one of them to astral project like I described above. Other times they're used to make people and objects invisible, and another time they're used to somehow remotely power and activate electrical equipment (even though that's not how the physical laws that govern electricity work). And when it would create more tension for the plot, one of the devices disintegrates.

See the writing in this movie is so lazy that they didn’t have just one Deus ex machina, i.e. Emily Blunt's character, they needed two. Well since there's 3 alien devices I guess technically there are four.

It's also very clear in this movie that the aliens themselves have an agenda wherein they want their presence to be revealed to humanity and they are guiding and/or setting up the whistleblowers to do this. But why? The aliens themselves clearly have vastly superior technology. They don't need to use a local news channel to get the word out. They could easily broadcast the reality of their existence themselves or even seize control of the Internet. If you have the technology and ability to travel across the universe then this is not hard to do. Or they could just land a ship on the White House lawn, in front of the Kremlin, or in Central Park. They don't need this long, convoluted plan wherein they imbue two children with abilities that won't manifest for over 20 years and then start working with dissidents and whistleblowers to try to bring the black ops organization down. It’s clear that the black ops organization has been interrogating, imprisoning, and probably torturing, and murdering aliens for most of the 80 years in question. Why do the aliens allow this to happen and/or keep coming to Earth and crashing their ships here? For advanced beings, they sure act pretty stupid.

Now many of these ideas here could have been developed into a good story that made sense had you given this to a more skilled writer who was trying to take the idea seriously. Give Emily Blunt's character the ability to mind control anyone she sees and then you can get her to accomplish most of the same things. It would have required rewriting a few things, but now it makes sense. Have people who are exceptionally strong willed be able to fight her control and now it's interesting and challenging because she has to grow her abilities and overcome something instead of just immediately being able to do everything the plot requires. Have the Black Ops organization act with some competency wherein the whistleblowers have to be clever to escape. Maybe not all of them escape and the Black Ops people actually kill some of them to demonstrate how ruthless they are. Further you could have the Black Ops people arguing that the greater good warrants this type of ruthless action and now they're interesting villains with a plausible motivation instead of just incompetent fools that we don't care about.

You could even have the alien agenda work within the limits of the movie. Suppose there's only one or two survivors from a crash that happened a long time ago, so they don't have the resources of their whole civilization available. These few surviving aliens have to work with the resources that are available to them on the Earth. They literally can't land a ship on the White House lawn, so they have to work in an underhanded way to accomplish their goals. I only saw the movie yesterday and without being paid I thought of these ways to make it just a little better. If I can do this in less than 24 hours without being paid, it’s certainly reasonable to expect Steven Spielberg and David Koepp to write and tell a coherent story when they're paid millions of dollars to do so.

Now the reason I say this movie is deeply immoral is because it presents alien abductions as a good thing, and even within the movie’s own rules abductions are evil things. One of the points in the third act is that the two leads were both abducted by aliens as children and the aliens gave them abilities. These abilities are key to the whole alien agenda and disclosure day. Without the abilities the alien’s plan doesn’t happen. This in effect says that alien abductions are good things.

However, this movie is clearly intended to take place in our world. Spielberg himself has made comments indicating as such. You can see this from how the designs of the aliens mirrors the classic idea of little grey men, and a lot of the documents and evidence the movie presents are clearly meant to mimic real world “events” and reports, such as Roswell. This is quite clearly not intended as just a throwaway fantasy or sci-fi story with no connection to the real world. It's intended to be a story about our own world.  If it wasn't they wouldn't make use of the reports and stories of alien encounters and abductions that circulate in our own world.

But once you actually look at these reports what you find is that the vast majority of people who report alien encounters and alien abductions report that these beings, whatever they are, are almost certainly evil and/or very malevolent. This is not a universal claim, as there are some people who claim that their encounters were quite positive. But the majority claim is that whatever's going on here, these things are evil. A strong sense of malevolence permeates through the stories people tell of these things. 

And so this movie is clearly intended to take place in our world, presenting a thing, that the vast majority of people who've claimed to experience it say is evil, as a good thing. Presenting evil as good is just flat out wrong, and perhaps even evil itself. I say this is probably unintentional as I really doubt Spielberg and Koepp thought this through. Given how lazy and stupid a lot of the movie is, I don't think they thought about this much at all.

Years ago, I did some basic level research into the alien abduction phenomenon and became convinced that the vast majority of the legitimate claims (that is the people involved are not lying, mistaken, confused, suffering from mental illness, etc) of alien encounters and abductions are likely demonic encounters as this just seems to fit very well. So naturally I argue that you should not present such encounters as a good thing.[2]

And even if you assumed that this movie was intended to be entirely fictional, and have no meaningful connection to our world, it’s still the case that these aliens abduct two 10-year-old children by deceiving them and presenting their spaceship as if it's a fantasy house and presenting themselves as animals. It's just child abduction. And even in a fantasy setting abducting children is just evil.

You should be incredibly suspicious of anyone who claims that they need to abduct children for “the greater good.” Human beings are not in an epistemic position to be able to justify such a claim, at least not most of the time (I’m a philosopher, I can almost always think of an exception). To justify a claim that doing something evil, like abducting children, is for the greater good, you need to have a total or nearly total level of knowledge about situation. Human beings don’t have that. Neither would alien persons. Only God Himself is in a position to make such a claim. So the only way to get out of the moral problems in Disclosure Day is to make the aliens into gods. But this is both philosophically and theologically absurd and ridiculous.[3]

So if you take Spielberg’s authorial intention seriously this movie is deeply immoral as it repackages abductions as good things. If you disregard authorial intention and judge the movie on its moral message alone it’s still a deeply immoral movie that presents abducting children as a good thing.

And further this is another case where with a little bit of thought they could have made this morally interesting instead of just wrong and problematic. Have the parents of both children be fully aware of what the aliens are doing and giving consent to it because the parents think it's for the greater good. Now as adults the two leads have to wrestle with this. Were their parents right?  Should they forgive their parents, be angry with them, betray the agenda, etc?  Now the aliens have the caveat that the parents consented to this so it's not so obviously wrong. Is consent really the be all end all to moral issues that our society treats it as or is it still wrong even though the aliens got consent? The whole thing takes a shade of moral grayness which makes it a far more interesting story.

This movie left me wondering, is Spielberg so big now that nobody dared to tell him, “No this aspect of the script is a stupid idea that doesn't hold up and you need to rework it?”  Given that Spielberg has made truly great movies in the past, and this one is so obviously foolish, I was just left searching for an explanation as to how this disconnect was possible. If my suspicion is correct, this may be a good lesson against pride and for humility. There is a reality that even for people who are genuinely talented (as Spielberg clearly is) you can get so successful that it becomes nearly impossible to get anyone to actually tell you the truth. This is a problem all successful politicians have. The livelihood of the people around them depends on the politician, so it is no longer in anyone’s interest to tell them unpleasant truths. I think this reality helps explain the extreme ‘arrogance’ of some people such as the Pharaoh of the Exodus, and why it seems like many popular and successful people have radically stupid ideas. If you are extremely wealthy and powerful and the livelihood of the people around you depend on you, it’s going to be very hard for you to get anyone to tell you the truth. The natural incentive structure turns so that the people around you are incentivized to lie to you. I saw this in some leadership while I was in the military. I don’t know that this is the problem behind this movie, but I suspect it was something like this. After all who in the film industry would have the gall and/or courage to tell Steven Spielberg no? I’m nowhere near successful enough that I need to worry about this and it’s pretty likely if you are reading something I wrote you aren’t either.

But the point is that we all need to have people in our lives who will tell us “no” when we have stupid ideas. It’s one of the reasons why as a Christian, I submit myself to a local church. If I start going off the rails there are people there who can tell me the truth and attempt to put a stop to it. It’s why I listen to other philosophers when they tell me something is wrong with my ideas. And if we interpret Disclosure Day in an ultra-charitable way and ignore just how lazy and foolish it is, something like this is probably the theme or point that Spielberg was trying to make. The movie ends with the word “listen” and the anti-alien humans are portrayed as stupid, arrogant, short-sighted, and evil. It’s a shame that Spielberg and/or Koepp didn’t take their own advice and listen to other people as perhaps they could have humbled themselves and made a good movie.

We all need humility and people who will hold us to account. And it’s clearly both lacking and needed in Hollywood as now even Steven Spielberg is making stupid movies that have not been thought through.

[1] For the rest of this review, I will be referring to this movie as a “movie” instead of a “film.” Calling something a “film” indicates a level of respect and appreciation for artistic merit. This movie is unworthy of respect and has so many flaws that any artistic merit is completely lost.

[2] Here is Hugh Ross explaining how and why the credible accounts of alien encounters are most likely demonic. https://youtu.be/pX-0IiCx5bo?si=VdNZ5x1MBQtR0D4K And here is a podcast I did a few years ago where I argue for the same conclusion. https://open.spotify.com/episode/2AGiulkirT55etgI1ExDDI?si=429202b7fe224220

[3] It’s philosophically absurd as making aliens into creator's, ala ancient astronaut theory, just pushes all the problems and questions back a step. If aliens created us, who created the aliens? They don’t function as an actual solution to the questions and problems unlike a metaphysically necessary being like God. It’s theologically absurd as no serious major religion describes God as anything like the aliens in Disclosure Day.