The Disclosure Day: Spielberg is no longer Spielberg

'The Disclosure Day': the Spielberg debacle nobody saw coming

The final scene is the perfect metaphor: a giant alien in a wheelchair rises, unsteadily, to do absolutely nothing. It is the most absurd moment in a film that began as a plotless car chase and ends up looking like a Scary Movie parody. This is what audiences have been saying since the release, a month ago, when the film finally arrived in high definition on media players around the world.

The decline of the director who won over an entire generation
The comparison with ET is inevitable. People remember the children flying on their bicycles in front of the moon; the new film shows no trace of that magic. The dialogue is absurd, the villains look like they stepped out of a comic book, and the performances border on permanent hysteria. Even the one moment some consider successful —a hysteria attack on a train— falls short of the scene with the tubed alien that looks like a chimpanzee in a hospital. A symbol of the filmmaker's current state.

Hollywood is dead, or simply gasping
It is not just Spielberg. The diagnosis extends to the whole industry: multimillion-dollar budgets are poured into mediocre franchises while good scripts rot in drawers. Audience loyalty is bought with special effects, not stories. And the experience of other adaptations, such as the failed He-Man, reinforces the impression that big-budget cinema avoids risk at all costs. The cultural touchstones the seventh art once created are becoming scarce, and audiences can feel it.

Amid the disaster, only one performance is saved: a hysteria attack on a train. It is not high praise, but it is the only piece anyone rescues from this production. Like the alien in the wheelchair, the film rises to prove there is nothing left to do. Spielberg is still there, gasping like a zombie, but the magic of the eighties is not coming back, not even in high definition.