A new Steven Spielberg movie is always a welcome event, and his latest film, Disclosure Day, which has just opened in theaters throughout Israel, is an ambitious sci-fi thriller widely hailed as a return to form for the 79-year-old master director, the most beloved and celebrated filmmaker of all time.
The good news is that much of Disclosure Day, in which Spielberg turns his gaze upward again, searching for the heavens’ other forms of life as he did so memorably in such classics as E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is thrilling. Disclosure Day has many parallels to Close Encounters in particular, and it could almost be a sequel of sorts to that film.
Like most viewers, I was hoping that Disclosure Day would be a real modern-day classic that could stand up alongside Spielberg’s early classics. His previous movie, The Fabelmans, was an uncharacteristically autobiographical film, about how he coped with his parents’ messy divorce and the antisemitism he faced at school by starting to make his own movies.
It was an essential film for anyone whose heart has ever been moved by Spielberg. It followed years of good but not great movies, such as the low-key remake of West Side Story, a sadly bland adaptation of the cult gamer novel Ready Player One, and Bridge of Spies, about a spy swap deal at the height of the Cold War.
But although Disclosure Day has an interesting, suspenseful premise and many beautifully staged sequences, it falls flat toward the end, becoming predictable and even preachy, pitfalls that Spielberg avoided so skillfully in his early sci-fi films. I suspect, though, that many viewers will get so caught up in the story that they will enjoy it despite its flaws.
Disclosure Day returns to a premise that worked so well in E.T. and Close Encounters, in which his human heroes discover the existence of aliens and must protect them from an angry government that wants to destroy them and keep them secret.
Plot and protagonists: alien secrets, corporate intrigue, and global tension
THE MOVIE is being released at a moment when trust in authorities is at what may be a historic low point, as people are increasingly worried about the power in the hands of a few companies that control incomprehensible amounts of data about every aspect of our lives. The advent of AI and the uncertainty about how it will affect the livelihoods of billions is also part of this mistrust.
It opens as the US and North Korea are facing off against each other in a confrontation that looks like it could turn into an all-out nuclear war. During this crisis, the film focuses on two protagonists who have never met but are drawn to each other by what they have gleaned from their previous contact with aliens.
The basic outline of all this can be gathered through the trailer, so none of this constitutes a spoiler. The first hero is Danny Kellner (Josh O’Connor of The Crown and Challengers), a brilliant computer scientist who has stolen a huge cache of data from the evil corporation where he works, Wardex. The data proves that aliens are real and have visited Earth many times.
Wardex is run by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, who often brings to mind Mark Darcy, the sometimes grumpy character he played in the Bridget Jones movies, as he scowls his way through this role), a tense tech magnate who will use every dirty trick and billion-dollar piece of technology to keep the truth about the proof of alien life a secret.
As the movie opens, Scanlon and his minions have kidnapped Danny’s girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), to get him to hand over all the data he has stolen, which he planned to release to the press. But he manages to outfox them, and soon is on the run with Jane, aided by his unflappably sweet colleague, Hugo (Colman Domingo).
The most haunting part of the film comes in the early scenes with the second protagonist, Margaret (Emily Blunt, who is also currently starring in The Devil Wears Prada 2), a Kansas City weather reporter who dreams of becoming a news anchor.
When a cardinal flies into her window and disrupts her breakfast with her mellow guitar-playing boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), it stares into her eyes. Suddenly, she answers him in fluent Russian, a language she has never studied.
Right after that, she discovers she can read minds. At the television studio, she speaks to a Korean guest in his native language, then goes on the air, making strange clicking noises, and collapses.
Soon, she and Jackson are also on the run, as she begins to realize that a forgotten trauma she experienced as a child mirrors one that Danny experienced and is the key to their bond and their mission:
They must find each other, and together the two of them can tell the world that aliens have been visiting Earth since at least the time of the Roswell incident in 1949, information they must release through a credible platform.
Action, performances, and standout characters in Disclosure Day
THE FIRST part of the movie features some amazing action sequences that will have you on the edge of your seat, and brings to mind scenes from other Spielberg movies, such as The Sugarland Express and Duel.
Much of the action involves Scanlon “diving on” characters such as Jane, which are reminiscent of Spielberg’s Minority Report and the VR battle scenes in Ready Player One. Scanlon sits in a lab attached to electrodes that transport him to the minds of others, and he can see what they are doing and manipulate them.
In a chase movie like this, you must identify with the characters to enjoy it, and Margaret and Danny are extremely likable. At times, I wished Blunt were allowed to show a little more of the snark she became famous for in The Devil Wears Prada movies, but Disclosure Day is going for something different.
O’Connor is always good, but this is the finest performance of his I’ve ever seen. Firth does his best to channel pure corporate, capitalist evil, but any movie that chooses this soft-spoken, thoughtful actor to portray the villain is paving the way for a moment of redemption.
Domingo has charisma, but his nice-guy character doesn’t get too much to do. Wyatt Russell as Jackson is very funny in the kind of role Teri Garr played in Close Encounters: the bewildered partner of someone in touch with extraterrestrial phenomena. Hewson, as Jane, makes a strong impression as a former nun who is caught up in events she struggles to understand.
I had mixed feelings about the glowing portrayal of Catholicism, which is presented here as the ultimate contrast to the corporate overlords. Jane’s mentor, Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), is open-minded and has a wry sense of humor, and everything about her faith is illuminated here. We only see nuns; there are no priests who might remind us of the huge pedophilia scandals in the church.
It seems to me a little disingenuous for a Hollywood liberal like Spielberg to idealize a faith that will not make women equal partners in the hierarchy and which outlaws abortion and condemns homosexuality, but perhaps he is trying to make the point that, despite all this, there are good people who are religious.
SADLY, THOUGH, while the first two-thirds of Disclosure Day are gripping, the third act collapses, turning what had been a complex story into a bombastic struggle between niceness and nastiness.
It was all too clear that there would be some kind of reenactment in which the heroine would confront her childhood trauma. “The only way to know your purpose is to go back to where it all began,” Hugo tells her. This is the kind of sequence that has been in countless movies and has lost any luster it may have once had.
What was great about E.T. and Close Encounters was that we could feel how the heroes identified and empathized with the aliens; we could see it in their eyes. In Disclosure Day, though, Hugo articulates the message that empathy is good in excruciating, preachy detail in a scene that derails the movie.
It takes us out of the action and tells us how we should feel, as he intones, “Empathy is something we all have from when we were children, and we lose it in this cynical world. For us to advance, we have to find that again. That human connection.”
No one is against empathy, just like virtually no one is pro-war, and it’s trite to hear this spelled out. It’s probably not a coincidence that following this, the suspense dissipates.
While I never stopped rooting for Danny and Margaret to triumph, at times I remembered the Tim Burton film Mars Attacks!, in which the aliens were anything but benign and played for laughs.
I also found myself wondering why it was so important that people see proof of alien life, when it seems like at least half the world is already convinced they exist, and it seemed to me the corporate class would welcome aliens and have them start programming AI.
Maybe Spielberg would think this is proof that I am too cynical, that I’ve been co-opted by the big-tech bad guys. But the important thing is that Spielberg kept me entertained for about two hours, and for that I am grateful.