If you haven’t noticed, things aren’t all that great out there. I mean, just in general, with wars raging in the Middle East, divisiveness roiling at home, AI poised to take all our jobs—you get the gist. So it makes sense that Steven Spielberg, the great American auteur of optimism, awe, and childlike wonder, would once again look to the skies. He generally sees aliens not as a destructive or frightening force, but benevolent creatures filled with curiosity, kindness, and wisdom. (His take on H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds being a notable exception.)
Disclosure Day is a film that suggests we should all be kinder to each other and listen to each other and lead with our “greatest evolutionary advantage”: empathy. And honestly, who could argue with that? The problem is, I found the final third of the film, when it rather explicitly spells out its themes, a bit moist. The more sentimental it got and the more John Williams’ soaring score all but begged for our tears, the less I enjoyed it.
But man, before that it’s a heckuva ride.
The film starts in medias res, with one of our heroes, Daniel (Josh O’Connor), rescuing his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), from a secretive government agency. (This all takes place at a pro wrestling match because if there’s one thing Spielberg can do it’s shoot the hell out of a set piece.) Daniel has something they need—a remote control-like doohickey that gives you access to other people’s brains and a whole lot more. And because Josh O’Connor has that expressive, gently handsome, sad-clown face, we never doubt for a second that he is the good guy and the men in black cars—led by a spectacularly bearded Colin Firth—are the baddies. Daniel grabs Jane, threatens them all with the doohickey, and escapes to a nunnery. Literally. Turns out Jane was studying to become a nun before she had a crisis of, well, it’s not totally clear. She still clutches her large cross necklace when she’s afraid, at one point, digging it into her palm and creating a kind of Spielbergian stigmata.
Meanwhile, in Kansas City, a perky TV weatherwoman named Margaret (Emily Blunt) sees a cardinal (the bird, not the religious figure) and suddenly just knows things. She speaks to her befuddled boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell, perfectly cast as the kind but clueless dudebro) in Russian. On the way to the television station, she is stopped by a cop for speeding and she knows things about him, too, intuitively. She gives him advice on how to fix things with his wife. (Buy her that red velvet cupcake she likes, she says.) He’s so shocked, he lets her drive away without a ticket. At the station, she speaks perfect Korean to a visiting dignitary—I should mention that while all this is happening, World War III is looming ominously in the background—and then, once on air, starts speaking in clicks and gulps, until she collapses.
Jackson takes her to the hospital but, of course, she doesn’t have a brain tumor or Parkinson’s and she’s pretty sure the men in black lurking outside her hospital room are not there to help.
She escapes and somehow, through a kind of telepathy/shared grokking of the universe, she meets up with Daniel.
There’s another key figure in this film and that’s Colin Firth’s good guy counterpart, Hugo, swathed in professorial tweed and played with paternal warmth by Colman Domingo.
Hugo, if you will, is Team Disclosure—he believes humans would benefit from knowing about the aliens in their midst.
Firth’s Scanlon is Team Concealment—he thinks mankind can’t handle the truth. Let the grownups in the room handle the aliens.
One of the film’s actually interesting philosophical musing has to do with Jane’s faith. If aliens exist, what becomes of God? Is a divine entity no longer necessary? An intriguing premise worked out a bit too patly by Jane’s beloved Mother Superior (Elizabeth Marvel) who notes that God wouldn’t be so selfish as to let all that vast space go to waste.
As mentioned, the first two-thirds of the film absolutely rips. Nobody can do genre better than Spielberg—hell, he invented a bunch of them. Part of that means inserting welcome bits of humor in the midst of the chaos. At one point, Hugo instructs Margaret to ditch her cell phone. She throws it out of the car and tells Jackson to back up over it, but he keeps screwing up—backing up again and again, missing the phone entirely. It’s not quite DiCaprio’s Bob desperate to plug in his phone in One Battle After Another, but it’s the sort of touch that elevates the film.
Because there are few directors who can orchestrate an action scene better than Spielberg, the chase scenes are unsurprisingly electrifying—including one involving a half-crushed car dangling from the side of a train and another one involving a car stopping on a dime at the edge of a cliff.
The acting across the board is exemplary, with Blunt a standout as a woman who suddenly knows everything—and isn’t sure she wants to.
In general, Disclosure Day is rollicking entertainment until that dewy-eyed bit in the end. I understand that Spielberg wants to appeal to our better angels but I wish he had done it in a more subtle way. But for better or for worse—mostly for better— Spielberg’s gotta Spielberg.
(Before signing off, there is one depressing thought that I have to get off my chest: Spielberg treats the “disclosure” as a seismic event—a game changer, the kind of thing that would make everyone pause, listen, and rethink their relationship to the planet. But did you know that Donald Trump recently declassified the government’s cache of files about UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) and it was met with a collective shrug? In fairness, there were no cool aliens in the file, but I can’t help but wonder if Spielberg’s premise is outmoded. If CNN broke into programming to tell us there were aliens in our midst, would we even bother to look up from our screens? Would it change a thing?)