At age 79, Steven Spielberg has lost none of his sense of wonder. But it can feel like, in his return to the extraterrestrial after two decades away, he’s talking to himself when a character in Disclosure Day remarks: “I think you lost your faith in people”.
Spielberg has dubbed this film his closing instalment of a trilogy begun by Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and ET the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). But it also feels surprisingly affected by the voracious self-reflection he pursued in his last, and semi-autobiographical, movie The Fabelmans (2022), and its conclusion that the camera is the ultimate weapon of truth, even if that truth may be hard for us to swallow.
