A wise soul once explained that every notable director's career is essentially a long, ongoing chat with the audience. Some filmmakers, like Michael Haneke, sit up high like a stern headmaster, ticking off everyone's failures. Others, like Lars von Trier and Ari Aster, sneak up uncomfortably close, goose the viewer, and then vanish snickering before anyone can call security. Steven Spielberg's career - arguably the most remarkable in popular cinema history - has always depended on the audience being on the same page, gazing up wide-eyed and guileless toward the light. His greatest films, from Close Encounters to The Fabelmans, invite awestruck back-and-forth discussion.
So you can understand why Spielberg waded into social division with Disclosure Day, his much-hyped summer event movie return. He has almost as much skin in this game as the rest of us non-trillionaires. Yet early box office, while solid enough, has been accompanied by secondary indices - namely a slew of disappointed foyer texts from friends and loved ones - suggesting the film is distinctly polarising. In the US, market research firm CinemaScore, which polls opening-day cinemagoers to gauge commercial prospects, graded Disclosure Day a B - the joint second-worst for a Spielberg film, ahead of AI: Artificial Intelligence's harsh C, and dead level with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Headmaster Haneke shakes his weary head again.