Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Ira Glass. On This American Life, one thing we like is a good mystery. Sometimes about really big things, but most times, the little mysteries are the best.
Our lost and found is currently filled with pants. I don't know what, I've never seen this happen. Wait, this is true?
This is true. Mysteries of every size, each week. This American Life, wherever you get your podcasts.
What can be disclosed about Disclosure Day? Well, it finds Steven Spielberg back in blockbuster Aliens Among Us sci-fi thriller territory, a genre he helped create with Close Encounters, and it feels like a spiritual companion to that 1977 masterpiece.
Just like that movie, our heroes are humans who are feeling compelled by something they don't understand, and they come up against a lot of authority figures trying to keep a huge secret from the public. I'm Ayesha Harris.
And I'm Glenn Weldon. Joining us in NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is the co-host of NPR's daily economics podcast, The Indicator, from Planet Money, Waylon Wong. Hey, Waylon.
I come in peace.
And also joining us is Jarrett Hill. He's the co-author of the book Historically Black Phrases. Hey, Jarrett. Hey there, I also come in peace. Very cool. I'm glad we're all peaceful. So, in Disclosure Day, Josh O'Connor is Daniel, a computer expert who's stolen something from his employer, a sinister shadow organization led by Noah. He's played by Colin Firth.
You can tell he's evil because he's trying to kill Daniel, but also his management style is really toxic. Emily Blunt plays Margaret, who does the weather at a Kansas City television station. She suddenly starts to experience strange abilities, along with a mysterious compulsion to find Daniel and help him.
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Chapter 2: What is the main theme of Disclosure Day?
Guiding both Daniel and Margaret is Hugo, who knows more about what's going on than either of them. He's played by the great and good Coleman Domingo. Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Chapter 3: How does Spielberg's new film compare to his classics?
Waylon, disclose to me, what'd you think of Disclosure Day?
You know, I mostly liked this movie, but I had to kind of like split my mind into two pieces. Because I think the film you could also think of in two different ways. Like one is just as a kind of sci-fi thriller, paranoid kind of chase type movie, which is a lot of like the first part of it. That I really enjoyed, especially as an X-Files obsessive from back in the day. I really liked that.
And it's a Spielberg movie, so... It's going to be well-paced, well-shot, well-lit, all the things. It's going to be like technically superb. But then there's this other track you can analyze the movie on, which is thematic emotional stuff. That I was not syncing with Spielberg on this one. Often I do. It's important to kind of set expectations.
And for me, this was not a Spielberg movie where he says something with a capital S that's successful. But it does work from kind of just a purely like propulsive, entertaining piece of film with like all the thriller aspects of it.
Okay. So summer blockbuster, but maybe not the emotional heft you were looking for. Yeah. Okay. How about you, Jared? What'd you think?
Glenn, I don't appreciate your recap of Waylon because that's about what I was going to say. It's like... Very big blockbuster-y movie with cars driving through walls. And it was fun in that way. I'm grateful to hear I wasn't the only one that didn't fully get it. There were parts of it that I thought were really fun and interesting.
Or, oh, maybe you're saying something that I would be fascinated by here. But other than that, I was like, I don't know exactly what... when this could have been set for some of the things that they choose to do, the news pieces of it. As a person who worked in local news, on air, and in production, I was trying to understand, what world are we living in here?
There were some parts of that that were really challenging for me as well.
Okay. I get what you're saying about that. How about you, Aisha? Where'd you come down on this?
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Chapter 4: Who are the main characters in Disclosure Day?
It felt old timey in a way that I don't think quite melds together well with what I think this moment is that we are currently living in. I also just think there was a lot of things about the execution of the storytelling that just didn't quite. become clear to me. I was confused as to why certain characters acted the way they were, what we were supposed to get from those things.
So all that to say, I still had a really fun time at the movies. I love hearing John Williams' score just pop up, especially during an action sequence. And I'm just like, oh yeah, they don't make movies like this anymore. It sounds like my childhood. But overall, this just doesn't feel like a Spielberg movie that I will necessarily return to anytime soon.
Okay. It's so fascinating you guys are talking about the blockbuster aspects of it as hitting more than the emotional stuff. I'm kind of not feeling the blockbuster aspects here. The thing about a Spielberg sci-fi film is that there's always some set piece, right? Some moment that after the movie's over, it's indelible, right? It's a moment that becomes the movie in your head.
You got the kid getting abducted in Close Encounters. You got the moon, like the bike across the moon in E.T., Those creepy drones in Minority Report and the tentacle in War of the Worlds. I still think about that. This movie mostly evaporated for me on the way home. I guess there is a train meets car sequence that I guess it's going to stick with. I just haven't seen the physics of that before.
And I was like, oh, that's how that would play out. That's interesting. But I was struck again and again by how much work in this film is left for the dialogue to do in the script. That felt unusual to me. in a Spielberg film, because he's always counted on his imagery to do the heavy lifting. I will say you are dropped into this movie, as you mentioned, in media res.
You don't know what the hell's going on. And at one point, very early on, a character says to another, well, was he an experiencer? Because you can't dive on them. And you're like, what the hell does that mean?
I have that in my notes. What is an experiencer?
And they never... Yes.
I don't think they ever explain it either. Not fully.
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Chapter 5: What are the emotional and thematic elements of the film?
And again, you don't understand why these characters do. And to me, that's exciting at first because it feels kind of like an anti-mainstream type of movie in that way, where it's like, we're not going to explain everything. But it does seem like once we get into, okay, this is what we're trying to be about.
And then it winds up trying to be about a hundred different things that don't all really coalesce into something I thought that worked. So we have Jane, right, who is Daniel's partner, who's played by Eve Hewson. And we learn early on that she used to be a nun and she still has a connection to that world. And she enters with the religious component of this film, the religious theme.
She kind of is supposed to carry all of that weight of the religious themes. And then other characters carry the weight of like, Issues with parents or like trauma with their childhood. And then there's the truth. There's the psychological thriller, paranoia thriller aspect of it.
But the Jane character I found interesting because the whole point is that like they're trying to repress this information. And I love this idea of truth. in an age where we can trust nothing, especially AI and all of that stuff. And to put that against religion and also like, what does that mean? But like, then it just kind of fizzles out and doesn't really explore any of those ideas.
And I just think that Spielberg, I would think, would have a little bit more to say about that than what I think he says here.
Yeah, I think that the discussions of faith versus, oh, what would knowing that we're not alone do to people's faith? I think it was a little ham-fisted, like this Jane character. give some speeches that I thought were a little bit too speechy for me.
I was not as engaged with that aspect of the film, mostly because I didn't feel like it added up to anything kind of cohesive or interesting or new. And in some ways it felt kind of simplistic to me. You know, Spielberg has been obsessed with aliens for a really long time, right? So if you take this film in conversation with his earlier films, you want it to present like
you know, maybe cohesive thesis or something of like, how is he feeling about aliens in this stage of his life? Right. And it's like also impossible to escape the meta narrative around Spielberg that he's getting older.
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Chapter 6: What did the panel think about the pacing and execution?
So with each film, you're like, is this his last one? Is this his like final statement about like everything that matters to humanity? Oh, my God. It's like all too much. But it's like if you think about E.T. being, you know, like what happens to kids when they encounter aliens and War of the Worlds is kind of like the ultimate nightmare version of that.
Like what if the whole planet encounters aliens? It goes really poorly. Then you're like, what is this? And I'm like, I guess this is what happens when elder millennials interact with aliens. I mean, I'm an elder millennial myself. And like the Emily Blunt character, I am a daffy lady who does the news. So in some ways I should have been like really hooked into what this movie was saying, but I,
I just wasn't sure that there was enough new ideas here in terms of like, how do we feel about there being intelligent life elsewhere? That is curious about us too. Didn't feel like there was breaking any new ground, you know?
There's an allusion to the aliens being like of supreme being nature. And I'm sure that's like the best collection of words to say that.
Yeah.
But, like, the way they said it, I was like, wait, what?
They definitely say Supreme Being, that's for sure. David Koepken had done it better.
Yeah, well, and I remember thinking to myself, like, if I were at home, I definitely would have rewound to re-hear what they just said, because how did we get here? Like, what are we talking about? I feel like I spend a lot of time thinking about God and religion coming out of divinity school in the last year.
And like I'm always interrogating these themes for myself as I've like left Christianity here recently and like I'm engaging religion in a lot different kinds of ways. And so when I saw this theme happening in the film, I was like, oh, this is interesting. But like I never really made any other notes past like supreme beings, God, question mark kind of thing. Like, what are we doing here?
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Chapter 7: How does the film address social and political themes?
Hugo keeps complaining that, well, you've been a bad boss and you're dismissive of ideas from the team. And that's like, why? That's not villain fodder. That's a bad HR meeting.
I do remember thinking, like, you're telling him he's being a bad manager, but he's, like, trying to kill people and, like, hide secrets and chasing people through woods. You said it better than I did. But also, you're not nice. It's like, I don't understand what we're talking about, right?
Like, I don't understand what's happening. You can stand to process feedback better.
Well, that's sort of the sort of gloss that's over this and this sort of, I think it's a generational thing here, maybe, where there's this idea of, you know, the Colin Firth character and all these other quote unquote bad guys, bad people who are in this movie who are doing, we're supposed to be rooting against them.
But the film eventually does also ask us to have empathy for them in ways that reveal themselves as the plot goes on. And meanwhile, have we even mentioned that apparently World War III is also supposed to be happening at the same time that this is happening? Yeah. And that just kind of like simmers in the background but doesn't really present itself.
Like I kept forgetting that it was even supposed to be happening except for like at one point there's a scene where people are clearly like in disaster preparation mode and they're rushing. But that's another thing that kind of – I realized when watching this movie and I went – I had to look back and kind of glance at Spielberg's filmography.
But I realized that like almost all of his films take place either in the past or the future. Yeah. Rarely does he make a movie that's relatively contemporary to the time that it comes out, right? Some exceptions might be something like E.T., Jurassic Park, Close Encounters.
But this movie is like, you don't, I think Jared's already kind of mentioned this, but you don't really get into, is this supposed to be the present day? Because the way that things play out, religion, yes, that is one aspect of it. That is something that some people would obviously be You know, if alien life was revealed, it would shatter their whole world.
But like, does that apply to most of the world? Why is this the secret that is the thing that is just like, oh, we can't tell people they can't handle this truth? I guess I just couldn't fully buy into that being such a bombshell. Would our worlds really be shattered? I don't know if mine would really be shattered.
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