Directed by Steven Spielberg | Written by Spielberg and David Koepp | 145 min | ▲▲▲1/2 | In Cinemas
How anticipated is the new fantasy action picture from the legendary Steven Spielberg? Among those of us of a certain age who grew up during the American filmmaker’s golden age — pretty much 20 years of features from 1975 — and most serious cinephiles, it’s an event. Spielberg is no stranger to science fiction going back to his first aliens-are-among-us classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in 1977. Since then he’s done ET and War of the Worlds, to name but a couple of his high-end alien fantasies.
Also on board this new movie is David Koepp, one of Hollywood’s most successful screenwriters who adapted the book Jurassic Park and other, more recent and excellent Steven Soderbergh movies. Like Close Encounters this is a film about alien visitors and the way human beings respond to the unknown. There’s a thread of spirituality in the themes, supporting the idea that human empathy is our best way forward.
It’s also very much a whistleblower thriller. Daniel (Josh O’Connor) is a cybersecurity expert that liberates a piece of alien technology from his skeevy employer and goes on the run with his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), who has a secret in her past that’s revealed in almost no time.
Meanwhile, a Kansas city meteorologist, Margaret (Emily Blunt) finds she suddenly has unexplained psychic and empathetic abilities. Margaret feels an inexorable pull to Daniel, even though she doesn’t know him, which upsets her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), while a mystery man named Hugo (Coleman Domingo) is something of a benign puppet master, pulling strings from a distance.
Colin Firth plays the baddie with the sinister whiskers, Noah Scanlon, who will do anything to keep the truth covered up, including trying to kill Daniel in order to secure the device and evidence he’s escaped with.
Much of this is very PG thriller stuff — the movement of the camera (oh, hi Janusz Kaminski) and the entirely recognizable score from nonagenarian composer John Williams puts you front and centre in Amblin-‘80s era Spielberg universe with his creative disciples — everything from ET to Poltergeist to Wargames. It wasn’t Spielberg who made all the best movies of the 1980s, but his influence was so profound many of the other hits looked and sounded like they could’ve been from him.
The fact he’s basically paying homage to himself is hardly something to criticize, but it does feel like Disclosure Day could’ve come out in 1986 rather than 2026. The script — which starts at a clip and asks us to catch up with character particulars — does stumble down a few hokey holes.
For instance, Scanlon having the ability to use an extraterrestrial doohickey to track our protagonists and even brainwash them, what a convenience that is. As far as a MacGuffin goes, that unnamed wandy thingamabob really covers the bases. It can do almost anything, which doesn’t aid the storytelling.
Further, the film asks us to consider Daniel and Jane as lead protagonists, but they’re characters who seem to more driven by the plot rather than moving it forward by their actions.
It’s a good thing we spend a lot of time with Margaret. Blunt is a delight, and for a good chunk of the running time Russell gets a lot of the best gags — this movie could’ve used a lot more of him and a lot more humour. The less said about the CGI animals the better, but it’s an obvious disappointment from the filmmaker who gave us Jurassic Park, which still looks good more than 30 years later.
The fact of the matter is alien invasion movies (and TV shows) — and thrillers, too — have come a long way since the ‘80s, but Spielberg and his talented compatriots have come up with a picture that completely ignores the legacy of The X-Files, Signs, and even his own War Of The Worlds, material with a lot more bite and mystery. Consider Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival from 2016, a film standing head and shoulders above this one in terms of its ideas. Even Contact, back in 1997, already addressed some of the issues around whether organized religion would balk in the face of aliens that Spielberg and Koepp forefront here.
All this said, Disclosure Day is never less than engaging. Given how much it trots out Spielberg’s stylistic greatest hits, it’ll be interesting to see whether it has more lasting power in the culture than the largely forgotten retro adventure Ready Player One.
One thing Disclosure Day has over that 2018 effort is the commitment to an ineffable sense of wonder Spielberg practically trademarked in his early years. This film’s conclusion delivers that in gushes, a splashy bucketload of awe. It feels good to be in the cinema to experience that with a crowd again.
