It’s no secret that Steven Spielberg is a master director. The former wunderkid turned Oscar winner and eventual elder statesman of filmmaking has long been known as a savant with the camera. Anyone who has seen Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Saving Private Ryan, or War of the World has seen tracking shots, dolly zooms, and perfectly blocked whip pans that have immersed them in the action. Even if you don’t know what those moves are specifically, you know that watching a Spielberg project simply feels different from watching your average Marvel movie or modern-era Star Wars film.
On his newest film, Disclosure Day, Spielberg shows that he’s still got it. Disclosure Day is an adventure-thriller centered on a team of citizens working together to reveal a loud-hidden truth about extraterrestrial life to the world. Visually, it serves as a culmination of so much of what has come before in Spielberg’s career, with a dynamic camera that never stops moving, intense shadows and stylistic lighting, and a thrilling train sequence that fans of his last film, The Fabelmans, will find nostalgic and inevitable.
Disclosure Day is also based on a story written by Spielberg himself, and serves as something as a final treatise on aliens from the man behind ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Instead of focusing on the aliens, though, Spielberg is much more interested in what they reveal about the humans here on earth, and what humans are capable of with such intense secrets.
Big, loud, and intensely sentimental, Disclosure Day has proven to be a divisive sci-fi blockbuster thrilling and mystifying audiences all around the world. Even at 79 years old, it’s very clear that Steven Spielberg is still a master of the form.
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