June 8, 2026

JOHN NOLTE: Steven Spielberg Hopes to Break a Pretty Dreadful 20-Year Run with Disclosure Day. 

The last 20 years have been quite a step down from a filmmaker whose name once stood for the best the movies had to offer. No one’s questioning Spielberg’s technical skills. Ready Player One and West Side Story both prove Spielberg still knows where to place his camera, compose a shot, and edit a sequence. The problem has been his choice of material and the execution of that material story-wise.

So now he’s returned to two areas that have worked out well for him in the past: aliens and superstar screenwriter David Koepp, who wrote Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, Lost World (which is underrated), and War of the Worlds. Granted, Koepp also wrote the dreadful Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but I blame George Lucas for that debacle.

I must say, though, the Disclosure Day trailer doesn’t do much for me:

Then there’s Spielberg’s current PR pitch in which he runs around on all The Shows saying he believes there is life on other planets. It reeks of the desperation of a guy who’s sweaty to make headlines for his $120 million movie.

I just hope he doesn’t go too over the top in hyping his movie:

Didn’t Stanley Kubrick already do this almost 60 years ago with 2001: A Space Odyssey?

The God concept is at the heart of this film. It’s unavoidable that it would be, once you believe that the universe is seething with advanced forms of intelligent life. Just think about it for a moment. There are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe. Each star is a sun, like our own, probably with planets around them. The evolution of life, it is widely believed, comes as an inevitable consequence of a certain amount of time on a planet in a stable orbit which is not too hot or too cold. First comes chemical evolution — chance rearrangements of basic matter, then biological evolution. Think of the kind of life that may have evolved on those planets over the millennia, and think, too, what relatively giant technological strides man has made on earth in the six thousand years of his recorded civilization — a period that is less than a single grain of sand in the cosmic hourglass. At a time when man’s distant evolutionary ancestors were just crawling out of the primordial ooze, there must have been civilizations in the universe sending out their starships to explore the farthest reaches of the cosmos and conquering all the secrets of nature. Such cosmic intelligences, growing in knowledge over the aeons, would be as far removed from man as we are from the ants. They could be in instantaneous telepathic communication throughout the universe; they might have achieved total mastery over matter so that they can telekinetically transport themselves instantly across billions of light years of space; in their ultimate form they might shed the corporeal shell entirely and exist as a disembodied immortal consciousness throughout the universe. Once you begin discussing such possibilities, you realize that the religious implications are inevitable, because all the essential attributes of such extraterrestrial intelligences are the attributes we give to God. What we’re really dealing with here is, in fact, a scientific definition of God. And if these beings of pure intelligence ever did intervene in the affairs of man, so far removed would their powers be from our own understanding. How would a sentient ant view the foot that crushes his anthill — as the action of another being on a higher evolutionary scale than itself? Or as the divinely terrible intercession of God?

Kubrick uttered (or typed) that quote in 1970, four years after Time magazine boldly went where Nietzche had gone before on its cover and asked “Is God Dead?” But that was still the era of mass media. In 2026, it will be interesting to see if Spielberg’s attempt to drum up some controversy Last Temptation of Christ/Brokeback Mountain-style over his new science fiction film helps to goose ticket sales.

It could backfire: “The more artful leftie websites have taken to complaining that the religious right deliberately killed Brokeback at the box-office by declining to get mad about it.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll