There’s a lot happening in Disclosure Day, so much so that Steven Spielberg drops the audience straight into what feels like the second act. It’s a bit disorienting.
I happened to see a matinee of the film the same weekend a certain president was holding a UFC event on the White House lawn for his birthday, so it was a little jarring to be dumped directly into a violent cage match, where, in the audience, Daniel (Josh O’Connor) is reluctantly delivering a backpack full of valuable goods to some shifty government-types in return for the release of his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson). As the exchange goes awry, Daniel and Jane flee with plenty of screeching tires, shattering glass, etc., etc.
The film slowly fills in the context. Daniel is a brilliant tech dude who works for the government and has his hands on thousands of classified files, so classified that they’ve been under virtual lock and key for over 70 years, because people can’t handle the truth. Daniel thinks the truth should, indeed, be out there, as it will change humanity’s perspective on, well, everything.
The truth? Aliens! You bet!
Meanwhile, spunky TV weather forecaster Margaret (Emily Blunt) finds her day going sideways as she is suddenly able to speak fluent Russian to her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell), read into people’s minds, and starts clicking a guttural alien tongue on live television before passing out. For reasons she doesn’t understand, she’s inexplicably drawn to Daniel, a man she doesn’t even know. She knows that she needs to find him.
There are car chases and action sequences, including a pretty thrilling scene involving a train. There are shifty government operatives trying to get to Daniel and Margaret. Among them, the most unnerving is Noah, played by Colin Firth (looking exquisitely sharp, I may add). One of the best scenes involves Noah using alien technology to “find” and interrogate Jane in an unnerving way. In the background, this whole time, is reliably silky-voiced Colman Domingo in the middle of it, communicating with both Daniel and Noah, and it slowly becomes clear(ish) what his role is in the whole conspiracy.
You can tell Spielberg has been itching to revisit aliens, as Disclosure Day seems like a mash-up of the wide-eyed curiosity of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and shadowy government menace of the Man With the Keys (and his ilk) in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. It feels like it has the bones of a lifetime of contemplation about alien visitors, but may not give those ideas the room they need to breathe.
There’s a lot in Disclosure Day that works. For instance, I loved the introduction of a religious perspective (Eve’s character had been a novice that decided to not become a nun), though I have to say that Battlestar Galactica and Ridley Scott’s Raised by Wolves delved into the melding of sci-fi and faith in a more satisfying way. Spielberg still can work his magic by portraying wonder (I thought Josh O’Connor was particularly good), and I was pleased that there were still bits of quirky humor (Margaret and Jackson trying to “destroy a phone” was hilarious). And despite the bad CGI, I appreciated that the aliens presented themselves to children as gentle woodland creatures to lure them (quite frighteningly) into their ships for a mind-meld. I totally would have followed them, too.
But beyond the storytelling feeling both drawn out and weirdly underdeveloped, there’s something about Disclosure Day that seems, well, dated. A huge part of that is the cynical times we live in. If Spielberg released the film even ten years ago, it overall may have worked better. This is a film where everyone across the world stares at their phones with the same token look of wonder at the same news feeds. This is a film where seeing (on a screen) is believing. This is a film where empathy is the answer to instant world peace. I wish that were all true (especially the empathy part).
Maybe we do need an alien invasion.
