Spoilers for Disclosure Day to follow, you have been warned.
When you’ve hit the big leagues the way Steven Spielberg has, audiences expect more. It’s a compliment to his skills as a filmmaker, but the thing is, he’s also at that point in his career/life where he wants to make art on his own terms. His recent projects before Disclosure Day speak to this; The Fabelmans being an exploration of his own origins as a filmmaker, and remaking West Side Story was a dream he had for himself.
Disclosure Day is built from Spielberg’s story and David Koepp’s script, and it stems from his desire to make a story about empathy and humanity. The focus isn’t so much the aliens, but what their presence reveals about us. This is where the disconnect comes in, because audiences think we’re going in for some sci-fi blockbuster movie about aliens, yet that’s only a small part of the larger story that is Disclosure Day. This can be frustrating for some, since there’s very little thought put into the conception of the aliens. Their design is the same imagery we’ve come to associate with aliens over time – big eyed and grey – and their technology is futuristic but there is no clear rules to how these devices work (which is a storytelling no-no). Their purpose also feels nebulous and unclear, we never quite learn what they want, only that they exist and want us to know they exist.
This leads us the faults in the CGI, because why did the animals (the aliens use animals to present themselves to be less freaky) look so uncanny and fantastical, when this is a director that made a T-rex look like the realest thing? Maybe it’s intentional because Spielberg wanted to exude this fairy-tale-esque imagery to the whole memory to emphasize the traumatic nature of the experience, since fairy tales are often used to carry dark truths. That entire sequence honestly felt like nightmare fuel for me – two children plucked from their beds, forced to receive truths they didn’t consent to. This seems to be what Spielberg is showing us, yet there’s a such sense of benevolence bestowed on these aliens that I felt my reading of this was incorrect.
The story also begins in medias res, which can be confusing if you walked in after the ads and then think you’ve somehow missed a whole chunk of the movie even though you weren’t that late. When we meet Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), he’s already defected from his company and stolen the alien device as well as all the confidential recordings of our interactions with alien life. Nothing wrong with starting a story like this, but it’s mostly done in action movies because the plots are leaner and there’s less context to weave in. When you make this choice in a sci-fi, we feel like we’re playing catch-up instead of riding the wave of the story.
The characterisation is a mixed bag. Emily Blunt delivers the best performance in the film. She’s brilliant as Margaret Fairchild, and that’s because her character is the most developed one in the whole story. We get a sense of how her childhood was, how she is as an adult, the struggles in her romantic relationship, her deepest fears – yet O’Connor’s Kellner, who is equally integral to the film’s narrative, doesn’t even have half the amount of development. We know he went to prison for cyber crimes, nearly flunked out of college, has a girlfriend called Jane (Eve Hewson), feels a disconnect with society, yet there is no sense of the why. When we find out about his encounter with the aliens, this can explain the why somewhat as he is clearly traumatised, but the film never explores this and glosses over this horrifying discovery. If I discovered that the aliens I am trying to help basically ruined my life, there should at least be some struggle. Instead, he never wavers from wanting to expose the truth, even when Jane’s life is on the line.
O’Connor and Blunt have tremendous chemistry and manage to build a believable connection between their characters – though the moment they both locked eyes felt like something out of Species 2 weirdly – yet there is nada when it comes to his own girlfriend. The script asserts the importance of that relationship, but doesn’t do the work to show us why. As a character on her own, Jane is great. Hewson does a remarkable job and really fleshes out Jane’s doubts and the dilemmas she faces with her fate. That interrogation scene between Scanlon (Colin Firth) and Jane is one of the more memorable scenes in the film; her resistance set against his unwavering desire to mentally invade her. It felt spiritual, like something out of an exorcist movie, especially when we have the close-ups of her using her crucifix as a way to break free from his psychic manipulation. So yes, it feels incredibly frustrating to have such good characters co-exist with such weakly developed ones.
The action in the film is stellar and is a reminder of what a technical craftsman Spielberg is. That long tracking shot when Daniel goes to steal a car, the sky-high tension in the car chase sequences – I felt an exhilaration I haven’t felt since the better Mission Impossible movies. The deep depth of field in the film’s imagery is just wonderful and is one of the reasons why the worlds in his films feel so real and authentic. Like that scene where Wyatt Russell’s Jackson is on the phone in a gas station store, and we can see the chaos ensuing in the background way before Jackson’s brief interaction with the worker about the gas station’s address. The broadcasting sequence in the final act feels overwhelming in the best way possible because of all the technical choices he makes – we get to feel the thrill that goes into breaking a huge story, yet also participate in the stillness of all those watching the story unfold for the first time. Instead of Margaret, it is an unknown news anchor (tremendous performance by Courtney Grace) who unpacks the story for the world watching, and in the hands of a lesser director, this choice would not feel as emotionally resonant.
I had already seen a snippet of the imagery before, so I knew what to expect, yet I felt emotionally overcome as I watched Grace see these images for the first time. It reminds me of something one of the characters said in the earlier part of the film – why would anyone care about this alien news when WW3 is unfolding before our eyes? We live in a society that has grown increasingly disconnected; we see horrible things happening in the world and merely acknowledge this before getting on with our lives. It’s part apathy part protective instinct. I know of so many people who have stopped watching the news because they feel like the world is burning and they cannot deal. So when Disclosure Day shows us all these people stopping to watch this story, our skepticism says it doesn’t feel real, because we cannot for a second imagine humanity so united on anything. But can we be? Spielberg certainly thinks so, because why else would he unite a woman defined by her empathy and a man who’s all logic.
It’s not that I want to reject Spielberg’s sentimentality or this ardent belief in humanity’s capacity for empathy. I understand the movie’s main themes and the swings he was going for. But for all this to coalesce, the narrative details matter. You can’t just have the main villain suddenly give up and sit down – the man was literally torturing aliens before – nor can you suddenly wheel in a big alien and then end the movie. We’ve frustrated because we know how good Spielberg is, but in the case of Disclosure Day, the script does not measure up to the craft, and that’s the real truth.
REVIEW SCORE: 3.5/5
