Even a disappointing Steven Spielberg film is more compelling than the recent slop hits Obsession and Backrooms because it’s fascinating to watch a great, popular artist work through his and our confusions in real time. Responses to Spielberg’s Disclosure Day illustrate contrasting perceptions of how cinema works and what it means for befuddled moviegoers, shill reviewers, and Spielberg himself. This latest project perverts his responsibilities to the popular audience — it’s a showcase for the condescension and manipulation now standard in contemporary politics and mainstream media.

Not everyone agrees on whether Disclosure Day fails or succeeds, or whether it’s simply sci-fi entertainment or a religious or political allegory. The fact that conservatives were interested in Disclosure Day even though it’s the work of a famous liberal — in fact, a Hollywood potentate who flaunts his liberal bona fides — is cause for consternation as much as hope. Could a film this bewildering be a great unifier in a period of hostile division, managing what so many entertainers have given up on and that politicians could not achieve? What anticipation did opposing pundits Glenn Beck and Manohla Dargis share that both could feel satisfied by in film this treacherously dishonest?

Returning to the sci-fi genre with Disclosure Day, Spielberg not only updates a message of global, interspecies, interplanetary communication that infused his 9/11 triptych The Terminal, War of the Worlds, and Munich. He also dares an audacious reversal of those sentiments when the subject of extraterrestrial visitors exposes the duplicity within the military-industrial complex and heightens the stress people feel when torn between secular skepticism and religious faith. Spielberg’s first masterpiece, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, bridged that gap 60 years ago, but since then, some faithless strain — Barack Obama — got in the way of Spielberg’s renowned beneficent optimism, to the point that he now delivers a story committed to authoritarian elitism and insulting to the popular audience of differing denominations. Disclosure Day’s conceit implies a moment of philosophical reckoning, when mankind discovers the truth about the origins of creation and theology, conveyed through the authority of our political system and media as represented by the main characters Daniel (named after Daniel Ellsberg) and Margaret (historically a figure of virtue).

We’re forced to rethink our notions about the integrity of political dissidents and public orators — Daniel and Margaret both representing Spielberg’s troubled yet ideal social paragons.

Here’s where Disclosure Day becomes problematic. It presents both political activism and media bias as more significant than the spiritual longing of a godless era. Margaret’s role as messenger takes precedence over her denial of faith –“I will not be anyone’s religion!” That Spielberg and scenarist David Koepp mistake her single-minded drive (careerism) with messianism is part of the film’s offense. Spielberg puts his faith in secular media power.

When I called Disclosure Day a sequel to Close Encounters last week, my point was that it’s a do-over that fakes spirituality in accord with Spielberg’s own Obama transformation, as explored in my book Make Spielberg Great Again but also as recounted in the U.K.-Irish Yahoo report of Obama being literally on set for the film’s most blasphemous scene, the painful stigmata of Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane. (Obama seems to have the same Caligari effect on Spielberg as on Springsteen.) That scene crosses a line of decency — it is a transgression against the basic sectarian proprieties that Hollywood once observed but that Spielberg apparently no longer finds necessary in his changed, warped, politicized idea of entertainment.

There’s social media hubbub that the film’s ending (Margaret telling her TV audience “Listen”) has religious connotations. “It’s also the first word of most Hebrew prayers,” Koepp told USA Today. But Koepp’s soundbite compounds the film’s unholy mess of spirituality and gimcrackery. It contradicts the expression of nondenominational faith that made Spielberg the beloved filmmaker whose imagination and humor in Jaws, Close Encounters, E.T., and the Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park movies united the world.

Despite Spielberg’s filmmaking flair (evident here in a rushed visual trickery repeated from the overly hectic Ready Player One), the revelation of alien life is clumsily delayed; it was already vouchsafed in Close Encounters, E.T., A.I., and War of the Worlds, but this time it’s presented cynically. Disclosure Day reflects the high-handed patronizing redolent of Spielberg’s comrade Obama, who enticed the mainstream into believing that its purpose is to create social change. Margaret’s media-rep disclosure is a “hope and change” announcement. It retrojects Daniel and Margaret’s childhood trauma, leading to adult machination. They’re cynical versions of the social misfits who were summoned to the mothership in Close Encounters, but now they’ve become socially privileged figures. Spielberg and Koepp justify the treachery that media have inflicted on the world for the past two decades, through several administrations in differing styles and effects.

When Disclosure Day is considered in political terms, it reveals the worst: Jack Posobiec warns that “Disclosure Day is anti-God open borders propaganda.” Critic John Demetry finds even more hideous parallels in the film’s faux spirituality and its toying with the occult. Critic Gregory Solman saw a “satanist warp and invert Catholic ritual” in the childhood flashback that “mocks a sacrament.” Jonathan Pageau argued, “The entire movie is a final desperate appeal to the traditional media as the only purveyors of truth.”

Disclosure Day actually feels like Distraction Day. There’s always been layers of complexity to Spielberg’s films: some personal artistic yearning that elevated the fairy-tale aspects of E.T. and A.I., the immediate dread that intensified the topical, political subjects of War of the Worlds and Munich. Many fans and reviewers prefer seeing Spielberg as simply the new Disney or the old M. Night Shyamalan, a purveyor of fluff to be admired for refining childhood escapism. But Spielberg’s late work — the institutional whitewashing of The Post, the grim Cold War in Bridge of Spies, the equivocation between monstrousness and deification in The BFG, the predetermined social lesson in West Side Story, the family crisis underpinning The Fabelmans — continually verge toward solemnity that is not the same as maturity or self-examination.

These films ritualize Obama-era brainwashing. As Spielberg confronts the millennium’s cultural and technological changes, his Hollywood status (a national magazine once said that he “rides a fantasy wilder than anything in his movies”) brings him into dubious contact and sympathy with elite globalists such as Obama and social decision-makers who determine public behavior. The result is Disclosure Day’s thin characterizations of power-wielders, their tools and accomplices. Both whistleblower Daniel and meteorologist Margaret are manipulated by unknown forces — during childhood alien abduction, they were endowed with extraordinary language and mathematical proficiencies. Their talents — described as knowing “the language in which the book of the universe is written,” a phrase that jumps from Judaica to apostasy — are specious when put to political use. Daniel, Margaret, and Jane possess “a need to believe and be believed for the crime of being astonished,” sanctified with a childlike innocence and mission.

When they are tortured by the UAP expert and deep-state villain Noah, Spielberg repeats the blue-eyed telepathy trope from Brian De Palma’s The Fury (an erotic chase film about adolescent psychic twins manipulated by shadowy government figures). Spielberg tries hard to regain what he once had as a vital, visionary storyteller from the era of American cinema’s renaissance — Jane is saved by the shocked stimulation that wakes Indiana Jones from a spell caused by the “Black Sleep of Kali” in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which rivaled The Fury’s moral retribution. But now the agape that once distinguished Spielberg’s playfulness from De Palma’s sexual satire has turned into trashy hokum.

Spielberg’s canonization of political pawns — especially saintly telecaster Margaret — plays like an effort to deny the millennium’s cultural and sociological crises. Disclosure Day’s UAP and espionage distractions cover over the realities experienced during Covid, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the 2020 election, January 6 and the lawfare that followed — including other similar catastrophes that mainstream media stooges falsified. This news media roll call resembles the sequence in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, where actual media stooges involve themselves in public deception about global affairs. Contrast that to Spielberg’s formerly ambivalent attitude toward authority figures, an ambivalence that now collapses into fealty when we see a Latina newsreader introducing footage of aliens being tortured by government scientists. Her ethnicity supposedly ratifies the personal emotional display that has ruined contemporary media. Pageau ridicules Spielberg’s deception, the moment in the plot when the alien info is finally disclosed to a global audience: “He releases it on the evening news which is then transmitted to all the traditional media companies that are named: ABC, CNN, Fox News etc. Anyone under 70 will realize that the movie could have ended in 10 minutes with a laptop and wifi.”

Disclosure Day dances around its deception through Koepp’s fancy phraseology: “The right to know outweighs the consequences of knowing.” Daniel’s self-defense contradicts the reality of news media bias and information blackouts. Spielberg’s automatic regard for news media refutes the public’s painfully developed distrust of journalists and political figures who attempt to dictate our thoughts and responses according to their own privileged self-interest. We know, even if Spielberg, Glenn Beck, and Manohla Dargis will never admit it, that Disclosure Day represents Hollywood’s capitulation to the political status quo.

At a time when Obsession’s low-budget wunderkind Curry Barker complains, “We’re tired of slop. We want good movies back. People are still hungry for movies that are original without some big IP, as long as the story is good.” Disclosure Day offers a story that’s both unoriginal and insulting. Spielberg stomps on his own sci-fi legacy as well as the public’s wariness of authoritarianism — it’s like the unidentified professional wrestler stomping on the spectator’s point of view in the first disconcerting shot of Disclosure Day.