A pro wrestler raises his foot, then slams it down at the camera. There must be a Film Studies term paper to be had about why director Steven Spielberg choose this image to begin Disclosure Day.
It has nothing to do with the plot. One of heroes, Daniel (Josh O’Connor), is in the crowd at the wrestling match, that’s all. Maybe it’s just an arresting image Spielberg always wanted to start a movie with. But if it is meant as symbolic, who or what is represented by the grinning fellow stomping our faces? And, considering the theatrical nature of pro wrestling, isn’t there a built-in implication that we’re in on the act?
Disclosure Day is a sci-fi epic in the form of a chase thriller. Emily Blunt plays Margaret, a local TV meteorologist in Kansas City who one morning finds herself able to speak and understand all the world’s languages and to read people’s thoughts and empathize with them telepathically. Then she blurts out a few lines of an alien click language on camera in front of the weather map.
Spielberg cuts between this strand and Daniel, who also finds himself suddenly endowed with these same extrasensory abilities. He and his lapsed-novitiate girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) are pursued by creepy armed agents of the military-industrial complex, led by a seemingly satanic Colin Firth. The ubiquitous Colman Domingo is Hugo, Daniel’s harried mentor, trying to guide all parties to a rendezvous.
Hawksian scenes of headlong action and overlapping dialogue ensue. The good guys are trying to disclose evidence detailing the government’s longtime contact with – and abuse of – extraterrestrials, and the efforts to exploit their near-magical technology.
There’s no doubt that Disclosure Day is the work of a master of cinematic storytelling. Here Spielberg is doing classically Spielberg-ish imagery and action, the sort of things he loves to do and is good at: stormy middle American skies, beautifully shot by his longtime cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski (Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List); fleets of menacing vehicles hurtling down the road choreographically to rousing John Williams music.
But this long-belated quasi-sequel to Close Encounters doesn’t have the magic of Close Encounters. Maybe it can’t; maybe our sense of wonder has been complicated since 1977. There’s also an improbable hairbreadth escape or two too many; several times in a row the bad guys are eluded with the strategy of “let’s sneak out the back.” Like 2022’s The Fabelmans, this film feels like an attempt by Spielberg at a magnum opus that doesn’t quite come off; a swing for the fences that lands as a ground-rule double.
Still, it’s a fine, exciting show, and the acting is strong. Blunt is particularly good, using flat American intonations and touches of subtle but daft comedy to navigate her very difficult role. Hewson is also memorable as the spiritually vulnerable Jane; her stricken face as she dogs the footsteps of her seemingly crazy boyfriend suggests one huge and very unconfident leap of faith.
The sensibility behind the story, however, scripted by David Koepp from a story by Spielberg, seems quaintly and regrettably outdated. It’s in the tradition of classic journalistic thrillers, built around the idea that if the good guys can just get the truth out to the public it will change everything. But it struck me that what we see of the video evidence, if it really were aired, would be dismissed by much of the audience as an AI “deepfake.” Honestly, that’s what a lot of it looks like, because, you know, that’s what it is.
And even if it were somehow unimpeachably believable, it still seemed to me that within 10 minutes or so everybody would be arguing over which party was to blame for the wrongdoing, or whether caring about the aliens was “woke” or whatever. A real “disclosure day” would be followed by endless news cycles with little real news but constant wrangling. I’d prefer to think I’m wrong about this, but partisanship does feel that extreme right now.
On the other hand, Spielberg and Koepp also seem to hold with the old-fashioned idea that the mere awareness of the existence of extraterrestrials would itself somehow be a threat to human faith and societal stability. A couple of characters express concerns that essentially paraphrase the ’50s sci-fi notion, as in Red Planet Mars, that this knowledge, by itself, “would start a general panic.” I suspect that, alas, the news might actually be met with a disappointing degree of indifference.
