Two strangers become involved in a movement to uncover the US government's knowledge of extra-terrestrial life.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colman Domingo, Colin Firth, Wyatt Russell, Eve Hewson
It's ironic that Steven Spielberg's best movie of the 21st century is his adaptation of HG Wells' War of the Worlds. That film takes a dim view of alien visitors that is contradictory to Spielberg's optimism regarding extra-terrestrial life. Elsewhere in the director's body of work, aliens are portrayed as benevolent beings; we are more of a threat to them than they are to us.
Such is the case with Spielberg's return to sci-fi, Disclosure Day. The film posits that aliens have long been visiting us, and we've been horrifically mistreating our guests.
The setup is oddly similar to Greydon Clark's under-rated 1980 sci-fi b-movie The Return (Disclosure Day's two stars - Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor - even seem to be channelling that movie's leads, Cybill Shepherd and Jan Michael Vincent). Unbeknownst to them, two people have been chosen by the aliens to break the news to the public that aliens are real. Daniel (O'Connor) is a cyber-security expert with a bag filled with USB drives containing top secret footage of aliens, some of it involving cruel experiments. He is pursued by a company named Wardex (they really couldn't think of a better name than one that sounds like a toilet cleaning solution?), which is desperate to stop Daniel from leaking the videos (the footage is watermarked "Property of Wardex, do not distribute," as though it's a Lionsgate screener). Wardex is headed by the creepy Noah (Colin Firth, effectively cast against type), who has in his possession an alien doohickey that allows its owner to turn invisible, communicate telepathically, or whatever else the plot requires at any given moment. Daniel goes on the run with his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson, whose striking blue eyes are employed to great effect) with Noah and his goons in pursuit.
Meanwhile Kansas City weather presenter Margaret (Emily Blunt) has an encounter with a bird in her apartment that suddenly gives her the ability to speak numerous languages and read minds. In the middle of a weather report she begins speaking in an alien tongue before collapsing. When Noah sees this footage he realises that he has more than just Daniel to worry about. Margaret ends up fleeing herself, eventually crossing paths with Daniel as they make their way towards Hugo (Colman Domingo, slightly less hammy than usual), a former Wardex employee who has set up an elaborate whistleblowing operation.
Essentially a chase thriller, Disclosure Day should be Spielberg's North by Northwest. Instead it's his Topaz, a tedious plot-heavy slog with the occasional brief moment that reminds you it's made by a filmmaker capable of so much better. The problems largely stem from David Koepp's exposition-heavy script, which reportedly went through more than 40 drafts yet still doesn't fully make sense. There are moments that make you wonder if some of those drafts got jumbled up, like how Daniel appears surprised to discover Margaret is a weather presenter, despite having already watched a video of her presenting the weather prior to that point. Disclosure Day plays like one long final act, one in which characters spend a lot of time telling us what we missed in the previous acts.
We're told from the off that aliens are real, so we don't get to share the protagonist's journey from disillusion to wonder that made Close Encounters so great. The aliens are frankly incidental; Daniel could just as easily have evidence of any other conspiracy and it wouldn't make much difference to the plot. When the aliens make brief appearances we wish Spielberg had kept them off screen, as the CG is ropey to say the least. The aliens don't look as bad as the various animals that show up, including a fox that is somehow less convincing than the talking one from Lars Von Trier's Antichrist (the fact that the whole world is currently discovering what a 16-year-old filmmaker was able to create in his bedroom doesn't do Spielberg any favours in this regard).
Disclosure Day is very silly, but it takes itself awfully seriously. It's a 2000s Roland Emmerich movie that thinks of itself as an '80s Spielberg movie. It's Mac and Me, but instead of flogging fast food it's selling the naive notion that the public can be trusted with the truth. Has Spielberg met the public? We can't even handle seeing an inter-racial couple in a cereal commercial; imagine how we'd react to the news that aliens are living among us!!! To this end I found myself on the side of the movie's ostensible villains. If the world's governments have evidence of alien life they'd be wise to keep it to themselves.
Any potential suspense is rendered moot by the laughable incompetence of Wardex. They go to ridiculous lengths to try to capture Daniel and Margaret, seemingly oblivious to the surveillance apparatus of the US military that would presumably be at their disposal. This setup might have worked 30 years ago (and it would have made more sense for Disclosure Day to be released at the height of X-Files mania), but not in an age when we are constantly being watched and recorded.
Blunt gives a fun performance but it's one that belongs in a different movie. Margaret's newfound telepathic abilities are played as though Disclosure Day is a '90s Jim Carrey comedy. She tells a lot of people their deepest secrets and not one of them demands that she reveal how she is privy to such information. The usually reliable O'Connor is wooden here, but in his defence he's playing a character as thin as store brand toilet paper.
There are a few moments that remind us we're watching a Spielberg movie. He is still a master of using reflective surfaces and frames within frames, but he repeats these tricks so often throughout Disclosure Day that they begin to feel like a crutch. The only real moment of nail biting suspense is a sequence involving an oncoming train. For a movie about how we might move forward as a species, it's ironic that its most memorable set-piece relies on a setup as old as cinema itself.
Disclosure Day is in UK/ROI cinemas from June 10th.
