Spielberg's 'Disclosure Day' Entertains But Offers Little New

The summer blockbuster season has kicked off in earnest with the theatrical release of Disclosure Day, director Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated return to his “aliens are among us” sci-fi roots. Verdict: there’s not much fresh or original here as movies about aliens go, but it’s a fast-paced film with a luminous performance by Emily Blunt that won’t fail to entertain.

(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)

The first half of the film is essentially a political thriller—shades of 1974’s The Parallax View and similar films—as global tensions have the world teetering on the brink of World War III. A cybersecurity specialist named Daniel (Josh O’Connor) has stolen a piece of alien technology and highly classified files from his employer, Wardex Corporation, a top-secret extension of the US government led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). Scanlon flushes out Daniel by holding his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) hostage. At the tradeoff, Daniel double-crosses them and escapes with Jane, and the two go on the run as Scanlon declares Daniel a traitor.

Meanwhile, Kansas City TV meteorologist Margaret (Emily Blunt) is having breakfast with her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) when a cardinal flies through the window and locks eyes with her before flying away. Margaret resumes her conversation with Jackson, only in Russian—a language she has never learned. On the way to work, she finds she can read the thoughts and feeling of other people, and converse in their native languages. And then—in a pivotal moment featured in all the trailers—Margaret starts her live weather report, only to lapse into an alien language on air. That moment immediately goes viral.

This brings her to Scanlon’s attention, as well as that of Scanlon’s Wardex colleague Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo). Hugo is the one pulling the strings behind the scenes to arrange for Daniel’s theft of the top secret materials. His goal: reveal their contents—detailing human-alien encounters over the last 80 years—to the world. Scanlon is equally intent on stopping the truth from ever getting out, and it becomes a high-stakes race against time as Daniel and Margaret try to evade his minions and find each other.

A vibe shift

I won’t say much about the final 30 minutes or so, because it would be giving too much away (although the final trailer gave some pretty strong hints). Suffice to say there is a pronounced vibe shift toward the mystical as the plot threads converge. In Spielberg’s capable hands, it works, although some have criticized the CGI, particularly for the animals. Given what those animals turn out to represent, I think it was the right decision to make them look otherworldly, as if they were stepping out of a fairly tale into our darker, grittier world.

Spielberg has assembled an excellent cast, but it’s Blunt who anchors the film. Her performance has been garnering critical raves and the kudos are well-deserved. Blunt is an accomplished and versatile actress and she brings all that experience to bear to portray Margaret, as the character discovers the full range of her abilities—and accesses some long-dormant childhood memories in the process. Blunt even used her vocal training as an actor to produce the alien language guttural clicks and pops in a single four-minute take, refusing to let the filmmakers rely on AI-based post-processing to do so.

This is a nearly two-and-a-half-hour film but Spielberg’s expert pacing keeps it from feeling overlong. With a few notable exceptions, the plot mostly makes sense and it all works best when the film is in full thriller mode. But the underlying themes and ideas aren’t particularly deep, and the big final reveal is decidedly underwhelming. There is nothing here we haven’t seen a million times before; we’ve seen it from Spielberg himself, in fact.

Honestly, it’s not clear why Spielberg wanted to make another alien movie when he already made two of the most seminal films in the genre: Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. Spielberg has credited a 2017 New York Times feature on the Pentagon’s UFO program for re-igniting his interest and declared himself even more convinced that intelligent alien life exists somewhere in our vast universe. Fair enough; plenty of scientists would agree it’s possible. But it doesn’t seem like he has anything new to say about it. Disclosure Day is closer in tone to Close Encounters, a fine film in its own right. But E.T. is arguably a perfect film, which is why it’s stood the test of time. How can you improve on perfection?

The short answer is you can’t, and Disclosure Day doesn’t. But it’s still an eminently watchable, impeccably crafted film from one of our greatest directors. If you just want an entertaining ride and can block out all the nagging inconsistencies, Disclosure Day checks all the boxes. Or you can just rewatch E.T.

Disclosure Day is now playing in theaters.