Disclosure Day’s ending gets one thing wrong that Spielberg nailed 49 years ago

Given Steven Spielberg’s return to the alien genre with Disclosure Day, I can’t help but compare the movie to his other films depicting extraterrestrials, and, generally, it holds up quite well. Much like War of the Worlds, this film is a high-stakes chase, and both are satisfying action rides. While almost no film compares to E.T.’s sense of wonder, some of the scenes with animals in Disclosure Day evoke a similar feeling. The closest comparison, however,is Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which highlights some of the strengths of Disclosure Day as well as its one major shortcoming: the ending.

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for the ending of Disclosure Day.

To be clear, I’m not accusing Spielberg of repeating himself. Disclosure Day is about cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who has stolen evidence proving the existence of aliens on Earth and the conspiracy to withhold that information from the public. Now he’s on the run from those conspirators until he can reveal the evidence to the general public, hence the title. Close Encounters is about utility lineman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), who sees a UFO while on a job and quickly becomes obsessed with them. His obsession then leads him to seek out the aliens.

Besides the alien connection, those plots don’t have a lot in common, but there’s a similarity in the structure of the films in that both are all about the build-up to the ending, which is promised not only by the story, but by the very titles of the films. Disclosure Day has to end with the disclosure of the alien conspiracy, otherwise you really don’t have a movie. Close Encounters begins with the UFO bypassing Roy and its lights burning his face, which means the ending has to bring about a much more significant encounter.

But while Close Encounters manages to over-deliver on that promise, Disclosure Day doesn’t. It presents a merely satisfactory conclusion.

In Close Encounters, as Roy’s obsession progresses, it becomes clear to him that the aliens will arrive at Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. It’s a visually stunning place that Roy doesn’t arrive at until an hour and 40 minutes into the movie. Then the spaceships show up and there’s some beautiful choreography of the lights and the music used to communicate with them. It’s captivating to watch, then we’re hit with an emotional gut punch when a big ship lands and releases all of the missing abductees. Finally, after the humans exit the ship, we see a group of aliens follow behind them concealed in shadow. Roy then joins the aliens on their ship and the lead alien steps out of the shadows, greets the humans with a wave, gets back on the ship and the ship departs. Aside from the little boy Barry (Cary Guffey) saying “Bye,” and Jon Williams’ rousing score, the last few minutes are entirely silent.

The progression is slow. Heck, the whole movie is slow, but never in a way that feels boring or like it’s wasting time. Then the ending is spectacularly beautiful in both its visuals and its depiction of alien contact. Everything you waited for in the movie is completely rewarded and then some.

Disclosure Day is a much faster, more action-packed chase movie, which all builds to some sort of public broadcast of the videos proving alien existence. The final scenes take place in the same location as one of the earliest scenes: a Kansas City local news station, where Emily Blunt’s character, meteorologist Margaret Fairchild who will disclose the existence of aliens to the public. She does this and the broadcast is carried all around the world. Then an elderly-looking alien comes out and speaks to the public, and just before Margaret translates the message, the movie ends.

The ending is satisfactory in a very sort of text book way. It delivers on what the movie has been promising the whole time — this is disclosure. The national and international stations carrying the Kansas City broadcast make clear the “bigness” of the event and that the whole world is being informed. Also the reveal of the aged alien at the end provides a nice surprise, as the aliens are never active players in the movie before this point, they’re merely referred to and seen on videos stolen by Kellner. The alien gives the scene a degree of weight that would be lost by mere humans conveying the story.

But while it checks all the required boxes of what this movie needed for an ending, it never transcends those requirements in the way Close Encounters did and still does nearly 50 years later. The physical act of getting back to the Kansas City TV station comprises probably the last 15 minutes of the movie, and there’s a lot of build-up to the broadcast with Margaret getting camera-ready and her convincing her boss to let her on the air in the middle of a broadcast reporting the beginning of World War III, which has stirring throughout the movie and explains why Disclosure Day has to take place now, so that the alien message can help the humans through the conflict or even prevent it altogether. All of it is fine, and the urgency of the situation is carried by the characters, but it’s hardly fascinating. Plus, a local TV station — and the same one we saw earlier — is hardly a visually interesting place to end the movie.

I suppose, had a bunch of aliens arrived or had the movie concluded at some other Earthly wonder comparable to Devil’s Tower, the movie would be accused of copying the ending of Close Encounters, which would likely be fair. And I can’t really say what I wanted the ending to be since my whole point is that I should have been surprised.

But I wasn’t.

The ending is fine — good, even. But it’s not spectacular in any way, and that’s what you want when the entire film builds to that singular moment. Which brings me back to the comparisons with his other films. While I really enjoy War of the Worlds, the movie is generally considered to be mid-tier Spielberg. It’s a great, exciting thriller that checks all the boxes of a good disaster movie. But War of the Worlds does not transcend to greatness in the way Close Encounters and E.T. do.

To address E.T.‘s ending, that movie is structured very differently from Close Encounters and Disclosure Day, in that wonderful things happen throughout and it isn’t as much about one big payoff. Yet when E.T. rejoins his people at the end, the sequence still manages to surprise and delight the audience more than Disclosure Day’s ending does.

Image: Amblin Entertainment

Right now, the excitement around Disclosure Day is that it’s “Spielberg’s best film in over 20 years” according to SFGate. I myself praised the movie, as it feels like a return to 1980s-style Spielberg. I meant that when I wrote that review a few days ago and I still feel that way now. But a big part of me wonders if, decades from now, Disclosure Day will have settled down near War of the Worlds as mid-tier Spielberg, instead of continuing to grow in esteem like Close Encounters.