Disclosure Day's Secret Indiana Jones Homage Echoes A Chilling Last Crusade Moment

Spoilers for "Disclosure Day" follow.

In general, Steven Spielberg isn't a filmmaker who references himself all that often ("Ready Player One" notwithstanding, of course). That said, he's also a director who can comfortably be labeled an auteur, someone who has a signature style and various thematic material that their movies utilize often. As such, there are moments throughout Spielberg's directing career where shots, scenes, and other aspects of a film will recall (deliberately or not) something from his past work. The majority of these moments involve Spielberg's stylistic tics more than anything else — for example, the "Spielberg face," where a character is regarding someone or something with a look of bewilderment, awe, terror, or some combination thereof.

Spielberg went deeper into decoding the imagery of his own oeuvre in 2022's "The Fablemans," a not-so-veiled look at the director's childhood experiences as a budding filmmaker. That movie made dozens of allusions and callbacks to the Spielberg catalog, including one of his "Indiana Jones" films in particular: 1989's "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." The emphasis on that sequel's imagery, particularly its opening sequence featuring a teenage Indy (played by River Phoenix), indicates how much Spielberg seems to regard it as personal.

The filmmaker's latest movie, "Disclosure Day," reinforces this. A moment during one of the most pulse-pounding setpieces visually recalls another moment from the "Last Crusade" opening, where Indy gains his fear of snakes while running around a moving train. The scene also alludes to one of Spielberg's formative experiences as a cinephile, harkening back to "The Fablemans." All of this makes the panicked train sequence in "Disclosure Day" a chilling moment on several levels.

In "Disclosure Day," Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) has just rescued whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) from the clutches of his employer, Wardex, when one of the company's goons tries to eliminate the pair by pushing their car into the path of a moving train. Margaret and Daniel manage to climb inside the nearest train car, which is full of musical instruments. Their entrance into the train subtly recalls the moment from "Last Crusade" in which young Indiana Jones falls from the roof crawlspace of a circus train car into vats filled with dozens of snakes below. 

To emphasize the similarity between the moments, the sound design heightens the eerie noise of the various instruments in the train car being triggered by the vehicle's movement, and the strings have an almost slithering sound to them. Then, similar to young Indy's screams of terror at the snakes, Margaret has a panic attack, forcing Daniel to try and calm her down by having her literally connect with the instruments (foreshadowing the film's climax).

Terror involving a train happens to be a Spielberg staple, and as "The Fablemans" showed us, it's for a good reason. In that film, young Sammy (Mateo Zoryan) becomes so morbidly fascinated with a train crash in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Greatest Show on Earth" that he's compelled to try and recreate it. Sammy is a thinly veiled and only slightly fictionalized version of Spielberg himself, who had the same impetus for beginning his directing journey. Thus, both "Last Crusade" and now "Disclosure Day" have moments where a character's terror is associated with their experiences on a train. In both instances, these moments underline Spielberg's relationship to the power of cinema.

"Disclosure Day" is in theaters everywhere.