{"id":720,"date":"2026-06-28T07:36:57","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T07:36:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=720"},"modified":"2026-06-28T07:36:57","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T07:36:57","slug":"movie-review-disclosure-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=720","title":{"rendered":"Movie Review: \u2018Disclosure Day\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Crafty old Steven Spielberg. In his latest film, Disclosure Day<\/em>, the great director and inventor of the summer blockbuster has taken his well-known obsession with space aliens and suchlike fauna and used it to misdirect his audience to look past the movie\u2019s real purpose while subliminally absorbing it. He means to get inside the audience\u2019s heads through the power of empathy exactly as the movie\u2019s own two \u201cexperiencer\u201d heroes are alleged to do, at will, with anyone they meet who may be useful to them.<\/p>\n

Read more America\u2019s Forgotten Founding Father: John Witherspoon<\/a><\/p>\n

What these experiencers, Danny (Josh O\u2019Connor) and Margaret (Emily Blunt), are said to experience is the ultimate secret of the universe, first confided to them by the kindly aliens who kidnapped them in childhood and performed some kind of operation on their left eyes. The secret is that empathy is not only our greatest evolutionary advantage but also, when accompanied by a TV remote-sized black box full of (presumably) totally cool hi-tech stuff, a powerful tool to dominate anyone and anything, or even make you invisible to your enemies.<\/p>\n

Danny and Margaret start out apart\u2014he a techie in Northern Virginia, she a TV weather reporter in Kansas City\u2014and unknown to each other. But the picture eventually brings them together in KC as the objects of several action-packed chase sequences, filmed with typical Spielbergian verve, as they try to deliver to the truth-lovers of the media all the government\u2019s hoarded secrets from 80 years of UFO sightings and alien visitations against the wishes of the government.<\/p>\n

The government here is represented by a fictional outfit called Wardex, officially tasked with the study of the alien presences and the protection of their documentary evidence from the disclosure to the public that Danny and Margaret are trying to effect. Wardex is headed by an Inspector Javert-like figure called Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), who apparently has virtually unlimited police powers at his disposal in order to stop them.<\/p>\n

The police, meanwhile, are headed by a ruthless killer named Casper Boyd (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), who is the total reverse of empathetic, while Danny and Margaret are remotely guided toward safety in the bosom of the all-powerful but totally benevolent media by a Wardex renegade named Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo).<\/p>\n

As I began by saying, however, all the space melodrama\u2014including, at the film\u2019s climax, an actual alien in the clever disguise of every other space alien Hollywood has represented to us for the last half century or so\u2014comes to address the People of Earth just like Michael Rennie (the last time aliens looked like tall, dark, and handsome white men in the movies) in The Day the Earth Stood Still<\/em> (1951). This time, the big-headed, big-eyed, spindly-bodied alien has to speak through his Earthling interpreter, Margaret, who, after much whispering between her and Danny and the alien, steps to the podium in the film\u2019s last seconds and says, \u201cListen\u2014\u201d [blackout]<\/p>\n

What is it that we are supposed to \u201clisten\u201d to? What else but the film itself, which, for those who can understand its unearthly language, turns out to be an allegory of Donald Trump\u2019s America, as Hollywood sees it.<\/p>\n

Cunningly, however, Mr. Spielberg never mentions the president\u2019s name; nor does he include a character overtly meant to stand in for him. Instead, he creates a massive police action centered in a Midwestern city intended to keep America pure from the taint of even the knowledge of, aliens and opposed by native empaths gifted by the aliens with something of their own empathic superpower, which allows them to triumph over a swarm of brutal federal agents (nominally working for Wardex) in baseball caps and body armor and dark blue uniforms without insignia who are willing to kill anyone who gets in their way.<\/p>\n

Remind you of anything?<\/p>\n

Though the movie was still in post-production at the time of last winter\u2019s siege of Minneapolis, it presents us with an uncanny resemblance to it, in which Margaret stands in for an idealized Renee Good and Danny for Alex Pretti, the highly empathetic (to aliens) Minneapolitans dedicated to defending any and all alien intruders from ICE. In this scenario, Casper Boyd is Jonathan Ross, and Noah Scanlon is Tom Homan\u2014who experiences an unexplained change of heart at the film\u2019s climax\u2014while gentle Hugo Wakefield, shepherding his people away from the big bad federal policemen, is obviously Tim Walz.<\/p>\n

Read more Military Depoliticization, Hegseth, and DEI<\/a><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t mean to say that the movie is not<\/em>\u2014as everybody, led by Mr. Spielberg himself, seems to believe\u2014about religion, albeit a peculiarly Spielbergian religion that replaces the deity with shadowy and inhuman technical intelligences. At one point Jane (Eve Hewson), a young novitiate nun, tries to talk Danny out of his mission of disclosure: \u201cPeople have been raised to believe in a supreme being, and now you want to show them actual supreme beings? The world can\u2019t handle both.\u201d<\/p>\n

The absurd idea of \u201cactual supreme beings,\u201d plural, really does seem to be how Mr. Spielberg sees the omniscient and omnipotent power of the empath. The \u201cSupreme Being\u201d here turns out to be just another movie superhero. But that\u2019s really the point. Steven Spielberg has made religion and politics into the same simplistic ideology, which is not Leninism so much as Lennonism. \u201cAll you need is love, man.\u201d Or empathy\u2014with or without the enabling alien remote-control device by which Daniel and Margaret effortlessly know everything<\/em> and can do anything.<\/em><\/p>\n

Both politically and religiously, it\u2019s all so easy that it\u2019s no wonder the Lennonist Democrats who run Hollywood and now so many others of our once proudly American institutions get so cross with us nonbelievers. How can we not see<\/em> these simple truths that are so clear to them?<\/p>\n

The real division in the movie, as in our politics today, is between fantasists and realists, which is why it is not all that surprising that Disclosure Day<\/em> managed to anticipate the media narrative about Minneapolis in so many ways. The fantasy of benevolent aliens using their powers of empathy to teach us cold, Western rationalists their own caring (but powerful!) ways is only one example of the left-wing and utopian thinking that is increasingly the only recognizable alternative to Trumpism, so far as the media are concerned.<\/p>\n

Rod Dreher, author of Living in Wonder<\/em>, naturally focuses on the movie\u2019s religious teaching, which, writing on his Substack, he identifies as a latter-day example of the heresy of Gnosticism, and he hints at its Satanic affiliation.<\/p>\n

You, reader, might be able to watch Disclosure Day <\/em>and spot the obvious problems and deceptions in its narrative. But it is extremely unlikely that most Christians you know can. They will be taken in by the pious older nun who appears serene in the face of disclosure, without questions about what the aliens claim and what challenges they pose to Biblical truths. After all, if religion is about nothing more than increasing our love and empathy, then why not?<\/p>\n

Does this not assume that \u201cmost Christians\u201d will automatically assume that an obvious cinematic fantasy, derivative of a thousand others just like it and with a utopian message of extreme Lennonist banality, presents something real<\/em> to them? Perhaps he\u2019s right, but I would be even more depressed than I already am if I allowed myself to think so. Christianity, properly so called, is no fantasy but has got to be the ultimate in realism.<\/p>\n

Read more Save American Lives and Prosperity by Cutting the FDA Bureaucracy<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Crafty old Steven Spielberg. In his latest film, Disclosure Day, the great director and inventor of the summer blockbuster has taken his well-known obsession\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies"],"yoast_head":"\nMovie Review: \u2018Disclosure Day\u2019 - Urban Economy news<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=720\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Movie Review: \u2018Disclosure Day\u2019 - Urban Economy news\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Crafty old Steven Spielberg. 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