The veteran filmmaker has once again deployed a proprietary blend of glowing lights and swelling strings to force emotional compliance from a helpless public.
The global theatrical release of Disclosure Day marks the veteran director's seventy-third successful campaign to subject a prestigious cast to a barrage of brightly lit, off-screen extraterrestrial phenomena; a relentless, highly calibrated cinematic offensive that leaves stars Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor with little to do but part their lips, widen their eyes, and gaze upward in a state of contractually obligated, glowing awe. It is a visual grammar that demands our total, weeping surrender to the cosmic unknown, locating itself firmly within a lineage that includes the canonical extraterrestrial longing of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the ascetic, punishingly rigid 1975 structuralist masterpiece Moses and Aaron, and, rather inexplicably, the neon-drenched vehicular nihilism of Justin Lin's The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.
Where lesser, perhaps more deeply insecure auteurs might attempt to build narrative tension through the messy, uncooperative mechanics of human dialogue or psychological friction, the director instead relies upon the auditory cudgel of soaring orchestral horns to instruct the theatergoing public exactly when to experience a profound sense of intergalactic homecoming; a blunt-force technique that treats the viewer not as a conscious, discerning participant in the consumption of high art, but rather as a helpless, Pavlovian organism drooling at the first glint of an anamorphic lens flare. Colman Domingo, an actor of otherwise formidable interiority, finds his profound talents entirely subsumed by the relentless, grinding machinery of Spielbergian optimism, ultimately reduced by the final act to functioning as a mere fleshy surface off which to reflect a localized, blindingly blue spacecraft exhaust.
We simply pointed a profoundly expensive, 10,000-watt halogen lamp directly at Emily's face, turned on a wind machine, and instructed the string section to sustain a swelling C-major chord until the test audiences began weeping uncontrollably into their popcorn.
As civilization teeters on the brink of numerous, overlapping historical collapses, it is perhaps fitting that the highest echelons of the cultural apparatus have mobilized hundreds of millions of dollars merely to remind us that looking at the stars while a French horn plays is, objectively, a pleasant experience; an endeavor infused with epic intentions that nonetheless shields us from the abrasive, alienating hostility that marks true cinema. The populace, desperate for any reprieve from the crushing banality of the terrestrial sphere, will inevitably line up to be emotionally manipulated by this beautifully constructed, utterly frictionless mechanism, willingly handing over their capital in exchange for the fleeting, synthetic comfort of being told that the universe is, against all available evidence, fundamentally benign.