Steven Spielberg has spent fifty years looking at the sky. Close Encounters of the Third Kind looked up in wonder. E.T. looked up in longing. War of the Worlds looked up in terror.
Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s latest film, looks up and then, almost immediately, looks back down at us. That is the most interesting thing about it. The premise is pure Spielberg.
A government shadow agency, WARDEX, has hidden proof of nonhuman intelligence for half a century. Josh O’Connor plays Daniel Kellner, a former WARDEX tech hired out of a prison parking lot. Kellner decides the truth belongs to everyone.
Colin Firth plays Noah Scanlon, the man who built the vault and intends to keep it shut. Emily Blunt plays a Kansas City meteorologist whose live broadcast becomes the crack in the dam.
David Koepp’s screenplay moves like a freight train. Nearly every beat is propulsive and engaging. I was so immersed that I overlooked how pedestrian the script is.
Disclosure Day raises an enormous number of questions. It gestures at loneliness, religion, corporate corruption, state secrets, power, money, empathy and more. Unfortunately, it introduces each one the way a host introduces guests at a party: a name, a handshake, and then on to the next.
The film barely asks its questions and lacks any capacity to respond to them. It wants to be about something. It settles for being about everything, which is another way of being about nothing.
An Invitation to Disclosure
And yet, the closing word of the film, which I will not spoil, is an invitation to empathy. Not an argument for empathy. Not a theology of empathy. An invitation.
And I have not been able to shake it.
Maybe the invitation is the point. Maybe what the world needs from the church is not always conclusions and not even questions but an invitation, empathy. An ear. A nonjudgmental ear.
A friend of mine runs multiple therapy clinics and he tells me that many of the people sitting in his waiting rooms are in therapy for a friend. Read that again.
They are paying a professional to do what a friend should do: witness their lives. They are purchasing presence.
Which brings me back to the title of Spielberg’s film. The disclosure at the heart of Disclosure Day may not be the disclosing of secrets at all.
The state’s secrets are the plot. They are not the point.
The real disclosure is the human one—the terrifying act of opening your life to another person, and the rarer gift of having someone you trust to receive it. Kellner does not simply want the truth released. He wants it received.
Perhaps the church’s place in the world is to be exactly that. A safe place to be received. Not the institution with the answers. Not even the institution with the best questions. The room where your disclosure lands on welcome instead of judgment.
Paul understood this. Writing to Philemon from a prison cell, he closes with a small domestic request: “Prepare a guest room for me.”
He does not ask for a verdict. He does not ask for a position paper. He asks for a room. He asks to be received.
What if that is our task? To prepare a place for others. To offer the ear that people are currently paying for by the hour.
Disclosure Day is not a great film. It is a good film haunted by a great instinct.
It knows, even when it cannot say so clearly, that the truth alone does not set us free. The truth received does.
Spielberg looked at the sky for fifty years. In the end, he is asking whether we can look at each other.
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CEO of Sean Palmer Coaching, Homiletician in Residence at Bammel Church in Houston, and co-host of the “Sacred Frames” movie podcast.