When his compatriots were making paranoid thrillers in the 1970s, Spielberg was busy perfecting a different kind of film, one so successful it hastened the end of the New American Cinema. Years later, he made an excellent film about whistleblowers and journalists, set in 1971, called The Post (2017). His new film—set in the present day—is also a kind of paranoid thriller, yet it lacks the dread and the shadowy possibilities of the best ones. This is a genre that’s most effective when allusive, and Disclosure Day is both vague and too literal.
The opening is certainly in the key of ‘70s Hollywood. Almost immediately, there’s a global war, a vast undefined conspiracy, and cybersecurity specialist Daniel (Josh O’Connor) is on the lam. He's supposed to hand back the information he stole from Wardex, a clandestine agency in charge of housing and researching extraterrestrial life on earth. Instead, he manages to break out his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), who was being held hostage by his former boss, Wardex CEO Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). They hide out in a convent—an early warning that Spielberg and co-writer David Koepp will periodically turn over questions of faith, though with little conviction.
Over in Kansas City, there’s a storm brewing, which TV meteorologist Morgan (Emily Blunt) announces with a ‘weather shimmy’. It’s a visit from a small red cardinal, though, that really blows her life out of control. Out of nowhere, Morgan starts having episodes: she involuntarily speaks Russian and Korean, makes incredible split-second decisions, reads strangers like a book. It’s like she’s developed superpowers, but has no idea what they are or what she’s supposed to do with them.
Daniel and Morgan don’t meet till well into the film. They’re both guided via phone by Hugo (Colman Domingo), who’s leading a small band of rebels against Wardex. Their aim, as you might guess, is disclosure on the widest scale, telling the world that aliens made contact with us some 80 years ago. Initially, the film draws rough parallels between the treatment of these otherworldly creatures and human aliens. But this is abandoned after a point, almost as if Spielberg is too invested in his love for extraterrestrial life to see it as a metaphor.
There’s something very Spielbergian in Hugo and his two gifted fugitives hoping to interrupt a broadcast of ‘World War III’ to rave about aliens. By the way, what is this war? Here again is a chance lost, to make the film feel specific, of the moment. Instead, there are vague mentions of North Korea and Russia, and the general atmosphere in America looks anything but tense.
Perhaps the most disappointing reveal is the aliens themselves. Spindly bodies, pallid colour, large bug eyes: they’re so standard issue that one can only assume Spielberg asked for a conventional look. There’s nothing novel, especially given the director's earlier films, about their desire to communicate with us either (that they do it via wild animals is the one innovation). It’s hard to imagine the public reacting to revelations of alien life the way they do in the film—with seriousness and hushed awe. Wouldn’t most people be losing their minds, yelling ‘I told you so’ at their phones?
Disclosure Day is at its most satisfying when it’s a breathless chase film. A couple of set pieces are fist-pumpingly wonderful—a scorcher involving car and train, a piece of comic whimsy with an invisible house—but there’s also a lot of pleasure in the more straightforward car chases and narrow escapes. You could make a drinking game out of Janusz Kamiński’s lens flares, but he still knows how to move a camera with more dynamism than almost anyone. As always, Spielberg brings clarity and crispness to his action scenes: even something as simple as a quick pan from one rear view mirror to another comes with a little surge.
One of the many weapons in Emily Blunt’s arsenal is an unblinking, sardonic stare, a direct line to the audience, sometimes deployed dramatically but more often comedically. She does it to great effect in Disclosure Day—and because it usually follows one of her sudden savant moments (which she retains no memory of), it’s especially funny. She’s the screwball heart of Spielberg’s film, more arresting than Josh O'Connor’s sad-sack whistleblower or Colin Firth’s one-note villain (her funniest, warmest scenes are with Wyatt Russell, who plays her clueless musician boyfriend).
Disclosure Day taps into a quintessential American worry, one that's shadowed the public consciousness since Watergate, that there are matters of great import that are being deliberately suppressed (at the top of the poster are the words ‘We deserve to know’). It’s possible that viewers will see the film and think of the Epstein files, fantasize about a full, sudden disclosure. Others might see in it a radical response to the farming and misuse of our data. My impression is Spielberg has returned to aliens not because he's angry about the world, but to escape into familiar fantasy. The only bit of irony that actually stings is America happily ignoring an ongoing World War, yet brought to a standstill and moved to tears by grainy footage of aliens.
‘Disclosure Day’ is in theatres.
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