Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: David Koepp, Steven Spielberg
Starring: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, and Colman Domingo.
Runtime: 145 minutes
‘Disclosure Day’ is Spielberg’s thrilling plea for humanity
“We are not alone.”
It’s a slogan that’s been emblazoned for decades on T-shirts sold at Roswell, New Mexico rest stops and on dorm-room posters alongside bug-eyed aliens and flying saucers. It’s an assertion that can be read two ways: as a promise or a threat.
Steven Spielberg’s films have read it both ways at various points in his career, with soul-stirring optimism in tearjerkers like “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and more ominously in his post-9/11 powerhouse “War of the Worlds.”
In “Disclosure Day,” the assertion that we are not alone serves as a litmus test, for both the film’s characters and the audience. Presented with irrefutable evidence of alien visitation on a scale that would upend our way of life and challenge our beliefs about the world and our place in it, would humanity descend into chaos or rise together in harmony to meet the moment?
All Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) knows is that the people have a right to know.
A reformed hacker turned cybersecurity specialist, Daniel steals the data he was meant to protect, files detailing decades’ worth of alien visitation and contact with humans dating back to the long-speculated Roswell incident from 1947. He and his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) abscond with the explosive information, but hot on their tail is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the villainous head of WARDEX, a shadowy government agency tasked with keeping evidence of alien visitation hidden from the American people for their own good. The breach couldn’t come at a worse time for WARDEX, as humanity teeters on the brink of World War III, with background news reports suggesting imminent threat of nuclear warfare.
As Daniel and Jane attempt to evade capture, something funny is afoot in Kansas City, where local weather forecaster Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) finds herself suddenly able to understand and speak languages she’s never learned. On air, clicks rumble out of her throat beyond her control, some glottal alien language that Daniel understands as code when he catches the news feed.
Connecting these two disparate souls is Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), a WARDEX mutineer who’s gone rogue with some fellow former employees on a mission to expose the truth. Hugo calls Daniel and Margaret “experiencers,” hinting at some mysterious connection between the two as he guides them away from WARDEX’s hound dogs and towards each other – and either the destruction or salvation of humanity.
Screenwriter David Koepp (“Jurassic Park,” “War of the Worlds”) has written a script that’s brisk and funny and packed with action. At its best, “Disclosure Day” feels like a happy marriage of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Minority Report,” with two strangers drawn together by forces greater than they can understand under the watchful eye of a repressive surveillance state. Koepp’s script perhaps trips over itself a bit trying to unpack so many big ideas at the pace of a big summer blockbuster – stuff about the fragility of and need for faith and how empathy functions as an evolutionary advantage, lofty ideas that could use more room to breathe
But oh, the craftsmanship! This is some of Spielberg’s most balletic camerawork, his restless eye moving from one thrilling action sequence to another, including a particularly memorable getaway that pits a car against a speeding train as Daniel and Margaret race toward their destiny.
What might that destiny be, exactly? “Disclosure Day” is reminiscent of so many of Spielberg’s films; he’s been grappling with visitors from outer space since he was a teenager making movies with his friends in the Arizona desert. But for all its familiarity, “Disclosure Day” is a film he only could have made now, at 79, a plea for unity and shared purpose in a post-truth era from a man who’s united us for five decades at the cinema.
It would be easy to mistake Spielberg’s enduring faith in humanity’s goodness despite all evidence to the contrary for quaintness, to dismiss his lean into empathy as the connective tissue that can and will unite us all for sentimentality.
They are charges he’s faced the entirety of his career and they’ve rarely been an accurate read of Spielberg’s work, which has time and again shown us the worst of humanity. His camera didn’t flinch from the slaughter on the beaches of Normandy in “Saving Private Ryan” or Plaszow concentration camp in “Schindler’s List.” He’s waged war with primal forces that can’t be reasoned with – sharks and dinosaurs, possessed semi-trucks and Nazis. And here, in “Disclosure Day,” the fear of alien invasion and the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation.
And here we are, over 50 years after “Jaws” ruined the beach for an entire generation, all so disconnected from one another, hermetically sealed in our own individual bubbles formed by our phone’s algorithms, so far removed from the kind of monoculture that made Spielberg a household name, we might as well be on Mars. Who could possibly believe there’s any coming back from this? Any more coming together in shared purpose?
And yet, Steven Spielberg still believes in us, even if we no longer believe in ourselves. It makes me want to believe in us, too.
Barbara’s ranking
3.5/4 stars
