The anticlimactic 2005 finale that still haunts Steven Spielberg: “The film doesn’t have a good ending”
No matter what you thought of Disclosure Day, the long-awaited sci-fi return from Steven Spielberg this year that some people liked and some people really didn’t, there was one undisputable fact about it: it contained several flashes of sheer magic from the old master.
There were definitely some slightly dodgy scenes in it for sure, moments that didn’t just defy logic but rather set it on fire and then stamped on it, like the fact that the secret military organisation knew there were only two people alive who could talk to aliens but didn’t bother to ask them for 25 years, or more shockingly, the fact that highly trained security personnel aren’t able to look behind them.
But then, when things went right with the movie, like with the absolutely jaw-dropping, high-speed chase scene that saw Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor try to make it from a car onto a train, and if you were watching in the cinema, you were instantly transported back to Spielberg’s glory years, to ET, to Raiders of the Lost Ark, to Jurassic Park. It was impossible not to have a big smile spread across your face.
While internet arguing over Disclosure Day has gone ludicrously past the point of hyperbole, with some calling it the worst movie of the decade, Spielberg himself is not averse to criticising his own films, as he did the last time he made a big science fiction blockbuster 20 years ago with War of the Worlds.
Starring Tom Cruise and a young Dakota Fanning, it was the adaptation of HG Wells’ famed novel from the late 1800s that saw Cruise as a dockyard worker trying to get his daughter to her mother while utter alien chaos and explosions go off all around him. As with most, if not all of Spielberg’s movies, it did very well at the box office, bringing in $604million against a budget of $132m, and critics were largely impressed, especially with the Oscar-nominated special effects on show and with Fanning’s performance, which for a ten-year-old was ridiculously good.
But Spielberg has had niggling doubts about the movie ever since. In James Cameron’s book Story of Science Fiction, Spielberg revealed, “The film doesn’t have a good ending. I never could figure out how to end that darn thing”.
Cameron concurred, reminding him that HG Wells couldn’t quite get it right either, eventually deciding that nothing more exciting than a common cold would defeat the aliens, which is what Spielberg decided to keep in the movie, with one extra flourish. He added, “I had Morgan Freeman help me with it with his narration. Morgan always makes everything sound better”.
While War of the Worlds was a success, making the movie didn’t come without considerable issues for Spielberg. His relationship with lead actor Cruise was strained because the actor was in the middle of his ‘jumping on chat show sofas’ phase, and also a doctor he had suggested to Cruise was picketed by Scientologists.
Meanwhile, Spielberg’s desire for secrecy, something that was also seen during the making of Disclosure Day, was also a bit of an issue, because the cast and crew had no idea what the aliens were going to look like, and the director refused to give the entire screenplay to anyone, even during filming.
Going forward, it isn’t likely that Spielberg will return to sci-fi for a while now, but he is intriguingly attached to a rumoured remake of Steve McQueen’s Bullitt from 1968, with Bradley Cooper in the lead role.
