Ever since you saw the TV commercial for Disclosure Day during last winter’s Super Bowl, you’ve likely been asking: “What is this movie?” Now I have the answer, and it’s somewhat underwhelming: It’s a thriller about people trying to go public with proof of human contact with space aliens. This movie finds Steven Spielberg in his gentle mode of mystic crystal revelations, the way he was in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
I’m not a fan of this version of Spielberg, as you’ve probably gleaned. Since it is Spielberg, the movie does have some remarkable things in it. It still left me unmoved.
He doesn’t ease us into the plot here. In Washington D.C., Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is a cybersecurity expert who has stolen a boatload of highly classified information from the NGO that he works for, and his CEO (Colin Firth) has retaliated by kidnapping his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) for leverage. In Kansas City, a cardinal flying into her apartment makes TV weather forecaster Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) unaccountably start speaking Russian at home. Then at work, she loses the power of speech and makes mysterious clicking noises. These two people who have never met must escape their captors and meet up, a job made easier by Daniel seeing the viral video of Margaret seeming to have a seizure during a live broadcast.
I can’t help thinking that this would have been better if Spielberg had made this in the 1990s with Agent Mulder and Agent Scully as the heroes trying to expose the truth. The animating factor behind both this movie’s plotlines is video footage of little green men landing at Roswell in 1947 and revisiting the Earth periodically ever since, which Daniel’s company has trusted him to cover up. This lore is so familiar — could that be why the story is short on excitement? Spielberg’s other stories about aliens, whether they’re light (E.T.) or dark (War of the Worlds), draw their energy from the fact that we don’t know what the aliens are capable of or what they want with us.
This movie does much better when it concentrates on its chase elements. The set piece at a railroad crossing where the bad guys push Daniel and Margaret’s car toward a speeding train is a highlight that feels like something Spielberg has been yearning to stage for decades. High-tension bits like that are balanced by the sort of character moments that good action movies have, like when Margaret tries to smash her smartphone by having her musician boyfriend (Wyatt Russell) run over it with his car, only for him to keep missing the device. “I’d like to point out how incredibly cool I’m being right now and how I’m just rolling with this,” he says. Russell provides some great comic relief amid the chases, while Blunt is the one other actor who brings her best to her role here, as repeated brushes with death unlock some repressed childhood memories that Margaret would rather not recall.
Yet every time Spielberg tries to get in our feelings, his movie steps into the muck. When the people gain superpowers from using alien technology, it feels like so much old hat, especially since Margaret already attains godlike abilities without it. The scene where she and Daniel escape from a band of armed mercenaries because the alien tech makes her appear like each soldier’s loved ones to them crosses over into dopiness. The subplot with Jane trying to reconcile her Christian faith with the existence of extraterrestrials feels undercooked, and the actual appearance of a flesh-and-blood alien (as opposed to the ones the characters see on old film footage) is a mistake. Spielberg’s longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski throws golden halos over everything in a futile attempt to create a sense of wonder.
I mean, I get it. With the world in the state that it’s in, Spielberg wanted to make something full of warmth and hope, showing humanity at its best in the face of first contact with an alien race. Hard to fault him for that, but Project Hail Mary already did all that stuff a few months ago, and did it without so much straining or pandering to the tinfoil-hat crowd. I’m afraid Disclosure Day goes down as a distinctly minor entry in the director’s imposing body of work.
Disclosure Day
Starring Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by David Koepp. Rated PG-13.
