‘Disclosure Day’ review: Same ol’ Spielberg

The legendary director returns to the well of aliens and human contact in the stripped-down but underwhelming Disclosure Day.

If there is one thing Steven Spielberg loves to have in his movies, it’s…broken families, actually. But if there are TWO things Steven Spielberg loves in his movies, it’s broken families and aliens. He’s used movies to ask whether or not we’re alone in the universe multiple times. More so, other people who’ve seen his movies have asked that same question in different ways. So now, nearly 50 years after Close Encounters of the Third Kind, we, as an audience, must ask another question: has Spielberg run out of ways to wonder whether we’re alone in the universe?

Disclosure Day, his latest, is a chase for truth. Daniel (Josh O’Connor) is running to reveal the truth, a hacker for a secret government agency who steals classified information about the agency’s decades of alien encounters. Noah (Colin Firth), Daniel’s old boss, is running to hide the truth from a public he thinks will collapse with the news of extraterrestrials. Margaret (Emily Blunt) is running to find the truth after experiencing random visions of strangers and inexplicable voices in her head. Hugo (Colman Domingo) is running to explain the truth to Daniel, Margaret, and the world. Jane (Eve Hewson) is running to understand the truth and how it reckons with her belief in God.

Big emotions on the big screen.

With Spielberg having written the story for Disclosure Day (longtime collaborator David Koepp adapting it into a screenplay), he’s asking one distinct question: can we handle the fact that we’re not alone in the universe? Given the current state of the world, stuck in political unrest, threats of bombings, and a constant challenge of identity, it seems like the answer is a resounding “no.” Spielberg understands the current context, playing out Disclosure Day with news reports of a looming international war peppered into the background.

Then his characters appear like nervous wrecks, grappling with the intergalactic weight they carry and not handling it well. On top of dealing with life beyond Earth, the script throws in themes of childhood trauma, broken relationships, identity crisis, and cynicism over hope.

It’s even ballsy enough to throw religion into this already heady environment, with Jane being a former nun, wondering if God even matters in a universe with flying saucers. This is all to say that, for better or worse, Disclosure Day is one of the more challenging Spielberg movies in recent years.

Too much and not enough.

Don’t be mistaken, Spielberg remains a pro entertainer. Disclosure Day moves at a fine clip throughout its 145-minute runtime thanks to Spielberg’s skills at pacing between character drama and action. It’s actually a more stripped-down affair than a typical summer Spielberg romp, with escapes on foot that aren’t too fussy thanks to minimal editing and car chases that don’t delve into chaos. He shows Daniel’s daring escape from the feds in a moving overhead tracking shot that’s as whimsical as it is tense, while the introduction of Noah’s villainy is by mere conversation at a kitchen table. The flashiest action scene in the movie is a thrilling train escape that borders on blink-and-you-miss-it territory for how quickly Spielberg jumps back into character drama.

That drama, combined with the typical Spielberg sentimentality, is the dominant force in Disclosure Day to its detriment. For all the big questions Spielberg asks, he focuses more on the emotions of the characters than on creating any engaging momentum. The first half hour of the movie is too dry as it introduces characters in understated ways and has Margaret’s inciting incident (her weather report with alien noises) presented with little flair.

It doesn’t help that legendary composer John Williams provides only sparse amounts of music for the back end of the movie, leaving the first half to take place in near silence. Maybe cinematographer Janusz Kaminski tries to compensate by overdoing the overexposed background lights to the point where some characters can’t be seen until they walk a little farther to the left.

Disclosure Day takes a big swing with lofty ambitions.

Neither of them succeeds in distracting the audience from bigger problems in the screenplay, such as explaining why Daniel and Margaret were chosen by the aliens to have superpowers in the first place, or why the villains simply give up right at the climax.

To be fair, the heart on its sleeve and philosophical questions pull you in the more Disclosure Day goes along. But with that big swing, you need to hit a home run at the end to make it all worth it, and sadly, Spielberg just can’t make it land. Without going into too many spoilers, Disclosure Day ends with a simple request to empathize with those some people may not understand or even be afraid of. That’s a fine message and one that definitely hits home, especially when we all heard it in some other movie (probably made or produced by Spielberg) from the last 40 years.

There are plenty of other movies that relay this message in more complex ways for those with more realistic struggles than just being lost in space. Sometimes it’s about the unjustified suffering of a group of people, other times it’s about one man’s decades-long identity crisis. Hell, Disney uses that message in most of its cartoons. Not only has it been done before, but Disclosure Day has nothing new to add to the discussion. The modern context of near-global annihilation and constant public distrust is too heavy for Spielberg’s sentimentality to rise from. It’s almost laughable that Spielberg thinks that the presence of little green men might solve nuclear war and the lack of basic human decency.

Stars in the sky and on the screen.

None of the movie’s weaknesses comes from the performances, especially Blunt’s. With a resume that shows her to be one of the most dependable actors in Hollywood, Disclosure Day is yet another peak for the Oscar nominee.

Blunt somehow mixes the old school confidence of Rosalind Russell with the outpouring emotion of Sally Field into the most heartfelt performance of her career. Thanks to her alien powers, Margaret becomes a trauma therapist for everyone she comes in contact with, which gives Blunt the chance to solve people’s problems breathlessly.

That’d be impressive on its own, but the way she makes Margaret come crashing back to Earth as a broken mess, clearly not able to grasp her destiny, is something to behold. If this doesn’t put Blunt in serious consideration as one of the best actors working today, it’s hard to know what will.

Emily Blunt does the heavy lifting, but the supporting cast is just as strong.

She’s got plenty of support in the background, too. Firth, usually picked for his soft British charm, makes for a surprisingly effective antagonist as something of a mad-scientist-meets-tech-billionaire. The aforementioned kitchen table conversation sees Firth using his calm demeanor as an intimidation factor as he bends his target to his will. He also has a neat face-off with the ever-reliable Domingo, and the two duke it out in a battle of cynicism vs. optimism, both being great avatars for said discussion.

O’Connor makes for a fine male lead here, erring closer to the scruffy everyman type Spielberg found in Richard Dreyfuss decades ago. It is odd that whenever O’Connor does an American accent, it’s so meek and nervous that it somehow makes him look ten years younger. Hewson is also a nice surprise by carrying the more interesting question of religion throughout the movie, to the point where you wish Spielberg had more time for her journey.

The bottom line.

The failure of Disclosure Day is not in its technical terms. It’s well-shot, has fun moments, great acting, and shows that one of our all-time greatest filmmakers still knows how to put on a show. But after Spielberg builds up so much anticipation for what he wants to say about connecting to the unknown and leaves us with such a simplistic whiff of an ending, it makes you feel all the more let down. Maybe he needed a more daring person adapting his story to fill in the blanks of the plot or leave the audience with a more challenging ending. Or maybe the Spielberg schmaltz is finally just not enough for us anymore. All the John Williams crescendos and teary-eyed revelations in the world can’t save us from ourselves. We need to do more than just listen, Mr. Spielberg.

Disclosure Day is now playing in theaters everywhere. Watch the trailer below.

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Images courtesy of Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment.