Quentin Tarantino has said that he will retire after he makes his next film. (Whatever that film turns out to be; the upcoming “The Adventures of Cliff Booth” was written by Tarantino but directed by David Fincher, so it doesn’t count.) Tarantino’s reason for this tends to change with every interview — Tarantino talks a lot — but his primary impetus seems to be: He thinks filmmakers get worse when they get old. “I know film history, and from here on in, filmmakers do not get better,” he said in 2021. He was 58.
If Steven Spielberg — whose 35th film “Disclosure Day,” a hit with critics and at the box office, was released last weekend — had stopped making movies at 58, films such as “Lincoln,” “The Post,” “War of the Worlds,” “West Side Story,” “Munich,” “The Fabelmans” and, of course, “Disclosure Day” wouldn’t exist. If Martin Scorsese had stopped at 58, there would be no “The Departed,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “Shutter Island,” “The Irishman” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” We would be so much worse off.
I thought about Tarantino watching “Disclosure Day” — and to be clear, as a Tarantino fan, I’d love for him to keep making movies when he’s a senior citizen, too — because whatever your thoughts about the film, it has two things that feel increasingly important today: It is relentlessly energetic, and it is deeply, almost painfully earnest. It’s a movie that feels shot out of a cannon in order to change the world: You know, like young people. Spielberg will turn 80 in December, and he seems more passionate, more urgent, than ever.
“Disclosure Day” follows three major characters: Daniel (Josh O’Connor) is a cybersecurity expert who has stolen government files that prove the existence of aliens and is trying to expose them to the world; Noah (Colin Firth) is the head of a security agency who is trying to stop him; and Margaret (Emily Blunt), the wild card, is a television meteorologist in Kansas City, Missouri, who discovers, out of nowhere, that she can speak fluent Russian, read the minds of everyone around her and communicate in an alien tongue. Daniel runs to get the truth out, Noah chases Daniel, and they’re both chasing Margaret, who is also chasing them, even if she doesn’t know why.
This leads to constant, kinetic movement. The movie is, for its first two hours, a series of ridiculously entertaining chase scenes, put together by the master of them. As we learned from his semiautobiographical “Fabelmans,” Spielberg is a filmmaker who was constructing chase scenes in his bedroom when he was 5. There is something both old-school and thrillingly current in the “Disclosure Day” action scenes, like being driven heedlessly through traffic by Formula One champion Max Verstappen: You’re moving at breakneck speed, but with a seasoned, deeply experienced hand at the wheel. It’s a throwback that — in a cinematic era more interested in comic books and garish CGI — feels thrillingly new.
But it’s Spielberg’s madly idealistic heart that ends up mattering most. He knows we live in a world so polarized that we not only can’t agree on the pressing issues of the day but can’t even agree on a shared reality. In “Disclosure Day,” Spielberg posits a need for something that is larger than all of us, a truly awe-inspiring discovery, to change the way we think about ourselves as a species — and so remind us of our shared humanity. Spielberg profoundly believes in humanity — in our specialness, in our empathy, in our ability to come together even as external forces try to drive us apart.
If that sounds naive or immature to you, well, it might be if it came from a 20-year-old kid. But Spielberg’s strength as a filmmaker lies in that earnestness: his profound faith in people’s better natures. He has been through all the strife that the past eight decades of American life have brought and, with “Disclosure Day,” is saying: Stay united. Link arms with your neighbor. Give yourself up to something larger. Never cease believing that better days are ahead — and that empathy is the key to unlocking everything. There are political and business leaders who have argued that empathy is some sort of weakness. Spielberg is offering a blockbuster refutation of that. “Disclosure Day” implores us to be strong together.
Now, maybe you believe that’s possible and maybe you don’t. But what matters is that Spielberg can combine almost 80 years of wisdom and his ability to power a movie with the energy of a jet engine into an alchemy of optimism, hope and a desire for a better world. You will believe that he believes — which might just make you believe yourself. It’s a movie that a 58-year-old Spielberg — or a 58-year-old Tarantino, for that matter — could never make. Spielberg, like his contemporary Scorsese, has the cinematic vitality of a teenager and the perspective of a man who has seen it all but keeps searching for more. If we’re lucky, he won’t stop.
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