‘Disclosure Day’ Review

Close encounters of the trite kind.

Emily Blunt (with space rod) and castmates in Disclosure Day. (Courtesy of Universal Pictures)

[Some plot points for Disclosure Day are discussed below.]

Disclosure Day sees Steven Spielberg return to a well-worn subject: extraterrestrials and the wonder they inspire. But unlike many of his previous efforts in this, um, space, Disclosure Day is bluntly ham-handed and overly literal. It feels like a film from an old master desperate to tell us something but unsure he can trust us to understand what he hopes to express without holding our hands throughout. And as such, there’s little room for wonder here. It’s all squeezed out by his too-tight grip.

The film opens with a jarring, almost un-Spielbergian image: a boot stamping on a human face. Luckily, this shot inside a wrestling ring does not go on forever, but it does set the tone: that of man against man, people howling for blood. From the POV shot of boot sole meeting cheek we shift to a shot of a man looking on in something like confused disgust. This is Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), and he’s told by the gaggle of armed individuals surrounding him that he is to surrender the backpack he is carrying in order to ensure the safety of Jane (Eve Hewson), his girlfriend.

The backpack’s contents are a set of hard drives containing footage of alien encounters as well as a mysterious object of extraterrestrial origin that does what we might think of as movie-space magic. If you need plot movement—a location revealed; a character uncovered; an escape hatched—this inanimate carbon rod filled with alien magic has you covered. Give that rod a ticker-tape parade: It’s the star of this show.

While Daniel’s making a run for it, Kansas City weathergirl Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is having some on-camera trouble. After being forced to race to the station following a strange encounter with a cardinal (bird, not clergy) that caused her to speak Russian for some reason, she utters a strange series of clicks only to collapse on air. The clicks, naturally, are alien language. Daniel, surprisingly, can understand her. Unraveling their connection is what much of the movie is about.

Well, that and hammering home just how much Steven Spielberg wants us to understand that empathy is humanity’s great power. Indeed, at one point, he has a character say this out loud: that empathy is the key to all consciousness in all the cosmos, and that humanity’s inability or unwillingness to engage in this empathy—embodied in the film by a nuclear crisis over North Korea that’s dominating the news—is leading to our ruination. A ruination we possibly deserve because of the awful no-good very bad Military-Industrial Complex, which has been stealing up alien artifacts and hiding them and doing . . . I dunno, something with them. Something bad. Weapons or whatever. Greed and avarice, that’s all private contractor Wardex and its head, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) are up to.

Emily Blunt, Wyatt Russell, and a feathered friend in Disclosure Day. (Courtesy of Universal Pictures)

It’s not fair to Disclosure Day or screenwriter David Koepp—who apparently wrote this in conjunction with Spielberg, who has described it as the culmination of his interest in the subject of alien life—to compare this film to something like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a genuine masterpiece of sci-fantasy wonder. But there’s something to be said for the earlier movie’s sense of detached awe, the innate curiosity at the heart of its desperate hunger for the truth and the uncertainty that comes with unknowing. That’s a movie that was written and directed by a young man who felt he still had so much to learn, so much to see, so much to do. It’s a movie made by a man who can understand abandoning his family and getting on that ship and taking it to wherever the little gray men want to take him. In many ways it’s a movie about that man, an unconscious synthesis of his artistically minded mother and scientifically minded father.

Disclosure Day, on the other hand, is a film made by a man who has seen it all—or at least enough to think that he has unlocked the key to it all. It’s a movie that has its feet firmly on the ground, more concerned with the mundanity of man’s petty squabbles, and the potential ugliness and destruction always lurking nearby, than any exploration of the cosmos. It’s a film that blithely dismisses the upheaval that revelations about extraterrestrial life would unleash, choosing instead to argue that a worldwide information dump about the existence of little grey men would be such a unifying moment that we’d all simply stare at our phones in wonder and forget about little things like “wars” or “North Korean ballistic missiles.” (Okay, fair enough: This is probably the smartest point the film makes.)

Disclosure Day is rarely boring but it’s never exciting, an oddity for a Spielberg action film. This is not to say that it’s a film made without skill: This is Steven Spielberg, after all, and the man can direct a killer set piece. It’s the little things he does with such seeming ease, like a tracking shot through a newsroom as Margaret is running to her post to make it on air just in time, a oner that would take most directors two days to set up and light and that Spielberg probably drew up the morning of shooting. The performances are good—Blunt as the fast-talking broadcaster is the best of the leads and I haven’t even mentioned her boyfriend, who is played with perfect comic timing by Wyatt Russell—but rarely rise beyond that.

You can practically feel Spielberg straining to convey the importance of Disclosure Day’s message, and there’s something admirable in his desire to say what’s clearly so deeply felt. But it’s that very strain that makes the film feel silly, almost trite.