Toy Story 5

"All children talk to their toys," Charles Baudelaire once wrote, and "the toys become actors in a great drama of life, scaled down inside the camera obscura of the childish brain. And in games they reveal their considerable faculty of abstraction and high imaginative powers; they play without playthings..."

Anyone who has seen just about any of the Toy Story films knows this to be true. I was eight years old when the very first one was released in 1995, ushering in an era of computer-generated animation and accelerating the decline of traditional, hand-drawn animation in Hollywood. I can remember feeling like I had to be more careful about how I treated my toys; I didn't want to end up like the malicious Sid dealing with a vengeful uprising. Much has changed since then, yet this franchise remarkably carries on. It's sad that some of the old gang are missing; some—like Don Rickles, Estelle Harris, and Jim Varney—have passed away, while others—like Timothy Dalton—have mysteriously been replaced. (They are replaced by Jeff Bergman, Anna Vocino, Blake Clarke, and John Hopkins, respectively.) But Tom Hanks and Tim Allen as Woody and Buzz (who were really at the height of their power way back in '95) are still here, though they surprisingly take more of a backseat in the action to Jessie, the cowgirl who joined them in Toy Story 2 in 1999; she's really the heart of this film. 

In Toy Story 5, Jessie (Joan Cusack) is still with Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), the adorable little girl who inherited Andy's toys in Toy Story 3 in 2010. She's still joined by companions Rex (Wallace Shaw), Hamm (John Ratzenberger), Forky (Tony Hale), and others, putting on elaborate productions that occupy vast space in her imagination. The problem, however, is that Bonnie, now age eight, struggles to make friends and isn't sure why. Neither are her parents. Upon investigating, however, Jessie soon discovers the reason: technology. Every house in the neighborhood is inhabited by children who are glued to screens instead of outside playing. Bonnie has been spared from screen addiction (for now). Her parents are concerned, and they become convinced that the solution can be found in their daughter getting her own device. In this case, it's a frog-themed iPad-style device called Lilypad (or "Lily" and voiced by Greta Lee), a smart device which hosts a cloud-based realm of avatars that Meta could only dream of. Like users of Meta's platforms, children like Bonnie become addicted almost immediately. While the film doesn't dwell on it too much, adults (especially parents) will probably watch what happens to her with complete horror as she becomes moodier and more combative. Lily does nothing to solve her anxiety; it only augments it.

In a surprisingly convoluted plot, Jessie goes on a hero's journey to try and separate Bonnie from these devices while also helping her find a human friend. She'll need the help of her companions Buzz and Woody along the way, who argue a bit (in a subplot that is never fully fleshed out) about who is her true deputy. Things go awry, and the gang gets split up—Jessie ends up at her former home (though her human, Emily, famously lost interest in her) where a new family lives. There, she meets and initially detests a group of retro tech-based toys like Snappy (a toy camera voiced by Shelby Rabara), Atlas (a GPS hippo toy voiced by Craig Robinson), and Smarty Pants (a toilet-training toy voiced by Conan O'Brien). Woody and Buzz remain at Bonnie's, where they try and take care of Lily. 

One of my initial reactions was that the film doesn't have the same punch that recent entries have, that, despite its noble intentions, Toy Story 5 doesn't hit as hard as one thinks it would. I may have spoken too soon. By now, there have been numerous articles in everything from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal about the parental fight against omnipresent devices in school settings. Children don't read those newspapers, but they do watch Pixar movies. One parent now claims that her young daughter won't touch her device since seeing it. Just as I and other then-young children were afraid of becoming Sid thirty years ago, now hopefully children of today will be positively impacted by this film. In that respect, you owe it to your children to show them this film. 

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Disclosure Day

It is difficult to say that Steven Spielberg was ever at his zenith, because, frankly, he always has been and always will be. But in 1999, it's fair to say Spielberg was riding high. Just a few days before he won his third Oscar for Saving Private Ryan (but controversially lost Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love), Spielberg appeared on an episode of Inside the Actor's Studio. The clip that has survived in the modern-day internet and goes viral every so often is the one in which host James Lipton pointed out the connection between Spielberg's parents and the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In essence, Spielberg's father was an engineer, and his mother was an artist. To communicate with the nearly arrived aliens, the humans use music produced with computers. Spielberg was clearly elated and told Lipton he had never realized that before.

However, my personal favorite moment was during the question-and-answer session near the conclusion of the episode in which Actors Studio students got to ask him questions. One student asked him two questions: one related to the act of listening, and one about whether or not he believed in aliens. After the chuckling from everyone had died down, Spielberg produced an elaborate, brilliant answer about the power of listening and how his own Jewish faith reminds him of the necessity to listen. He then paused, smirked, and calmly said, "I do believe in aliens."

Steven Spielberg has directed musicals, horror flicks, action, and, of course, science fiction, among others. He has done everything from the Peter Pan story to dinosaurs to the Holocaust, from animation to comedy. Yet just as Martin Scorsese is forever inextricably linked to gangster sagas, and Alfred Hitchcock is to thrillers what Michael Moore is to politically charged documentaries, Spielberg will never stop being tied to stories of aliens. We all know his alien films: the optimistic tale of family and friendship in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and cautious first contact in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as well as the horrors of what he described as an allegory to the reaction of 9/11 in War of the Worlds. He has never shied away from the possibility that we are not alone. (Even Indiana Jones met them.) After passion projects like West Side Story in 2021 and The Fabelmans in 2022, Spielberg has returned to them yet again, this time in Disclosure Day. 

If you were disturbed by the genocidal invaders of his adaptation of H.G. Wells' famous story, rest assured, Disclosure Day is more Close Encounters than War of the Worlds. It's a story that attempts to marry themes of truth and faith, however clumsily, all while trying to convince us that humans would stop killing each other if only aliens showed up to distract us all. The story focuses on two people: Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a meteorologist based in Kansas City,  and Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), a cybersecurity expert on the run. Kellner is whom we meet first in a somewhat peculiar opening at a wrestling match. We see that his girlfriend (Eve Hewson) has been taken hostage by a mysterious cabal led by Noah Scanlon, the leader of a corporation called Wardex that serves as a secret arm of the U.S. government and is played by Colin Firth. Kellner has in his possession some sort of powerful, non-man-made tool that Scanlon desperately wants. 

Our other main character is Fairchild, a meteorologist with aspirations to become a lead anchor. One morning before work, as she and her boyfriend (played by Wyatt Russell, the son of Goldie Hawn, the star of Spielberg's first theatrical film, Sugarland Express) discuss possibly packing up and moving to a new city, but their conversation is interrupted by a cardinal who presents itself before her and takes her breath away. Inexplicably, she suddenly can speak Russian, Korean, and even a unique language that might not be from our own planet. Her on-the-air alien speech causes herself to faint, and it also gets the attention of Scanlon and his gang. Simultaneously, a Wardex defector who wants people to know the truth about aliens, whether or not they have visited us before, and what Wardex has done to them, also desperately seeks Fairchild out while trying to match her with Kellner before it's too late. This man, named Hugo Wakefield, is played by Coleman Domingo.

Early reaction to Disclosure Day suggested it was his "best film in twenty years." I wouldn't put it that way. It's not as good as War Horse or The Post, for example, and the only film of his in the past twenty years that it is unquestionably better than is Ready Player One. (Yes, I liked Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.) Part of this is due to diminishing marginal returns; in essence, it's hard to top not only some of the alien classics already mentioned but a whole host of other work, especially when you consider he has been nominated for fifteen Oscars in the past twenty years alone for directing, producing, and writing. Another part of my somewhat muted response is the screenplay by David Koepp. Koepp, who also wrote the screenplay for Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, has always been one of the sharpest writers in Hollywood, but sometimes his dialogue here adds to the goofiness of the situations.

Goofiness or not, even respected thespians like Blunt and Domingo struggle to make sense of these lines, while others like Firth, an Oscar-winner, certainly make peculiar choices (in his case, by barely moving his lips when he speaks). Yet as summer popcorn entertainment in the vein of what audiences have come to love from a movie by Spielberg, Disclosure Day suffices. There are action-packed car chases and even an exciting moment involving a train. Yet as a truth thriller akin to something like The Parallax View or All the President's Men, it falls short.   

Still, it is a work of Steven Spielberg, and it's always a gift to see something he does. Along with his frequent collaborator Janusz Kamiński (his cinematographer since Schindler's List), he has a singular talent for making simple moments like men opening car doors in unison or a character looking off in the distance feel grand and operatic; this skill is one of the reasons he has remained the paramount director of Hollywood since he first broke out onto the scene. It's these typical Spielberg moments, like those chase scenes, that will send chills down your spine. If you can tolerate some of the more problematic parts of Disclosure Day, it's worth one more alien tale from the master of cinema.

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