REVIEW: ‘Disclosure Day’

Now 79, Steven Spielberg has spent the past few years dredging up his roots. His previous film, The Fabelmans, was a cinematic version of an autobiographical novel, following the course of his life from age 6 to age 18. What was weird about The Fabelmans is that usually such works are the first publications of a budding writer rather than a septuagenarian’s career capstone. Now he’s gone and made a movie about aliens called Disclosure Day, so you might think it’s a return to his glory days as the auteur of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. But it doesn’t resemble those landmark works at all, either in quality or meaning. Close Encounters literally incepted serious science fiction as a box-office staple and E.T. was an unparalleled modern fairy tale that was for a decade the highest-grossing film ever made.