Steven Spielberg is no stranger to making movies about aliens. Between Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and War of the Worlds, few other directors can match Spielberg’s otherworldly output. ‘Disclosure Day’ joins that list, but it’s not really about aliens. It’s about compassion, accepting your neighbours, and then, weirdly, it’s also about god.
The trailers were refreshingly coy about plot details, but Disclosure Day’s story is largely what it appeared to be: there’s a conspiracy to keep the existence of extraterrestrials secret, and a plucky resistance group trying to expose the truth.
We follow Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity specialist who has defected from the “baddies”, and Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a TV weather reporter who unwittingly becomes host to alien knowledge and abilities. What follows is a largely by-the-numbers chase movie, as our heroes attempt to outrun the villainous Wardex Corporation, led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). It’s entertaining and beautifully shot, but rarely surprising or daring.
Each of our dual protagonists has their partner along for the ride, and together the pairings bounce from peril to peril as they try to reach the resistance group’s base, eventually connecting along the way. Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson) is Kellner’s girlfriend, along for the ride after having been kidnapped by Wardex, while Jackson (Wyatt Russell) accompanies Fairchild with increasing frustration.
The trailers presented ‘Disclosure Day’ as quite a dour, self-serious affair, but thankfully, that’s not the case. There are plenty of funny moments sprinkled throughout the drama. Russell plays the fool wonderfully as Fairchild’s suffering boyfriend, reacting to the increasingly bizarre events as most of us would, with incredulity and swearing, and there are some brilliant sight gags sprinkled throughout the film.
Not all of the laughs feel intentional, though. Our screening chuckled at the ridiculousness of a few moments that I sense were meant to be played straight, like Kellner hiding from about 40 armed Wardex employees behind a small wooden fence that they could clearly see him through.
Wardex’s incompetence is another bugbear. For an organisation hellbent on stopping the alien conspiracy getting out at any cost, they have a real aversion to killing people, and their plan in general seems to be to sit around and hope the aliens don’t come back. They feel like villains in a kids’ movie, there to provide the “mild peril” that the title card warns of, but rarely actually offering any real threat. In truth, the whole thing has the vibe of E.T., but with an adult cast.
Firth brings some fire to the table, putting in a stellar performance as Wardex’s enigmatic leader. He’s no scenery-chewing Bond villain — just a man doing what he thinks is right — and he carries himself with a quiet intensity that’s both deeply threatening and oddly disarming. His standout scene comes early in the flick, when he uses an alien McGuffin to mind-control Jane.
Both actors put in a shift here, but this is also where the religious imagery makes its heavy-handed presence known. An earlier scene establishes that Jane is a former nun who lost her faith in her god. As he remotely interrogates her, Scanlon quotes scripture, while Jane resists his control by digging her cross into her hand, causing her to bleed from the center of her palm. It’s all very on the nose.
This comes straight after Jane tells Kellner not to reveal the existence of aliens, because that knowledge would stop people from believing in god, and they need god. The rest of the movie then goes to great lengths to disprove this shaky strawman of its own creation. At the same time, it tries to rattle the foundations of Abrahamic religions by asking, “What if god loves aliens as much as us?” — a question that the Catholic Church at least has largely had an answer to for hundreds of years.
Even the resistance group led by Hugo (Colman Domingo) seems to revere the aliens as “closer to god” than humanity, with one of them basically praying at the Fairchild’s feet at one point. It feels like a movie made by someone who heard the famous Arthur C Clarke quote — “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — and took the wrong lesson from it.
Minor spoilers in the next paragraph!
Disclosure Day asks you to think, but has a plot that kinda falls apart once you do. What’s going on with the alien McGuffins that everyone is using to do “magic”? Don’t worry about it. And why can Colin Firth control it if he’s not one of the chosen ones? Reasons. Why have the aliens not come back to recover their lost crews? Shhhh.
And despite all that, Disclosure Day is still an enjoyable ride. This is Spielberg after all. The man has made a film or two, and a lot of his brilliance still shines through the sheer plotlines. The writing is excellent, the performances are gripping, and the cinematography is world-class (nobody does a sweeping long shot like Spielberg). Regular collaborator John Williams tackles the score, and it’s so evocative of the early Spielberg magic this flick is trying to recapture. Sure, the animal CGI is a bit naff, but you can almost forgive the otherworldly look of the creatures, given context.
Perhaps it’s all just Spielberg’s attempt to reconcile a belief in aliens with a belief in a higher power. Strip away all the big theological ideas, though, and ‘Disclosure Day’ is about having compassion and loving thy neighbours. That’s a message the world — and especially America — needs to hear right now.
It’s an earnest movie that wears its themes on its sleeve for all to see. You can tell that its heart is in the right place, but ultimately, it doesn’t have much interesting to say.
3/5
‘Disclosure Day’ is showing in theaters worldwide now.