Disclosure Day
/The final trailer for Steven Spielberg’s latest film Disclosure Day opens by setting up a sci-fi story. We see close-ups of characters' faces as they look to the sky, and we hear sound design evoking the distant explosions and crackling fire lighting the sky, while synthesizers pulse away.
But then the trailer does something I have hardly ever known a cinematic trailer to do.
At 0:10, a voiceover segues into an on-screen talking head interview with Spielberg himself telling us about his motivations for making this film and placing it in the context of his directorial career, referencing his 1977 classic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s a slippery slope the trailer editors tread here. Spielberg’s commentary lasts a full ten seconds, taking us out of the film’s story world and into the realm of documentary.
At 0:21 we come out of the director’s commentary when a blaring foghorn-like synth accompanies a shot of a shining spaceship emerging through billowing clouds. Meanwhile we have a ticking clock motif (as readers of our blog will know, here we insert obligatory reference to our 2017 blog on the Dunkirk trailer–a textbook example of this ticking trailer trope).
By 0:34, Spielberg’s commentary is back again (perhaps we need to go back to the dvd menu and turn off “Director’s Commentary”?), and now he is talking about “the most extraordinary event in human history.” The director’s commentary here actually distracts us from one of the coolest sonic elements of this film’s trailer, namely at 0:43 when Emily Blunt’s character (a meteorologist) begins speaking in a breathy clicking language as though possessed by an alien mind, reminiscent of character Wendy’s communication with the xenomorphs in Alien: Earth.
Musically this middle section of the trailer is accompanied by slowly evolving synthesizer chords. The music remains minimal as we see quick clips introducing the cast: Colman Domingo, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth. When the trailer evolves into an action thriller at 1:12 as a car explodes through the wall of a country house, the music comes in blaring, with walls of synthesizers and choir, but the intensity doesn’t last.
Hilariously (yet unintentionally?), at 1:23 we cut to a shot of a camera feed from a newscaster announcing, “We’re interrupting our coverage,” and on cue, Spielberg’s commentary is back, pontificating as if he’s Joe Biden on a slow day on the campaign trail. As Spielberg references, “something bigger out there…” we’re seeing a large deer with antlers in a young girl’s bedroom.
A flourish on the drums and a set of trailer triplets leads us into a bright and triumphant orchestral chord at 1:41 as we see girl, deer and assorted four-legged friends walking through the snow towards a house in the forest whose windows are ablaze with light. The music is loud and moving as if in slow motion, as main characters speak and walk in slow motion while seemingly uncovering a deep secret at the heart of this story.
The trailer’s pace has slowed down here, so maybe it’s a great time to turn that director’s commentary back on and indeed they do, as Spielberg is back on the screen at 2:06 taking another stab at telling us that this alien story actually is true.
To hammer home Spielberg’s words and to finish with a bang, we hear the upper string section playing a repeating set of short notes as a bass tone slowly glissandos downwards. Meanwhile the camera rotates around the head of a creature looking down at a child on a medical table. At the start of the shot it’s a deer’s head and by the end of the shot it looks like E.T., and at 2:32 it is making the clicking sounds that Emily Blunt made earlier in the trailer.
Now over the years we have come across trailers that use spoken words that are not part of the dialogue of the film itself. It is a rare move that is risky, because this kind of non-diegetic speaking takes us out of the story. One very effective example of this was the use of a dramatic recording of a Rudyard Kipling poem in the 28 Years Later trailer in 2025.
But in the case of this Disclosure Day trailer, the incessant deadpan director’s commentary from Spielberg (with all praise and respect to the great master himself) serves to distract us from the story being told by his cast, while also confusing us to wonder what he really means by claiming that this is a true story. What started out as a sci-fi action thriller wears the disguise of a documentary. Or maybe it’s a comedy? It’s impossible that he based the film on the reams of just-released UFO documents. And we can’t blame it on the trailer house because of Spielberg’s direct involvement. I guess we’ll find out on Disclosure Day, which incidentally is June 12, when this film hits theatres.
— Jack Hui Litster
