Disclosure Day Wants You To Believe
Steven Spielberg’s UFO movie magnum opus takes us to the stars and back.
One thing Steven Spielberg’s 2022 self-autobiographical masterpiece, The Fabelmans, revealed is that the filmmaker’s whole career may be a series of feedback loops. The divorced parents. The return to childhood. The awe and wonder at the unknown, undercut by the bitterness of reality. The train.
But if it is, then Disclosure Day is a beautiful culmination of those feedback loops — a synthesis of Spielberg’s entire sci-fi movie career (and then some) that turns that feedback into a brand new song. Sometimes it’s an unwieldy song, with a few too many ideas and obvious motifs. But it’s one that feels like the clear next step after a soul-baring film like The Fabelmans. Some might call it a return to form, for others, this is maybe a return to the overly familiar. But even though it calls to mind the best of Spielberg’s most iconic blockbusters, beneath its wildly entertaining crowdpleaser is a relentlessly hopeful treatise on humanity’s inherent capacity to embrace the unknown.
Disclosure Day drops us in medias res, after Daniel Kellner steals valuable data from WARDEX with the intent of sharing it with the world.
Conceived as a sort of spiritual sequel (though, it has to be said, not an actual one) to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Disclosure Day is less a UFO movie than it is about the knowledge of UFOs — specifically, knowledge that has been suppressed by the authorities for decades. Oh yes, the truth is out there, and humanity deserves to know…or do they? That’s the central conflict that Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity expert-turned-whistleblower, must wrestle with as he flees from WARDEX, the shadowy military organization that has safeguarded secrets of alien contact since Roswell. Daniel is one of dozens of former WARDEX employees who have defected from the company, led by former higher-up Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who is spearheading an operation to release the information to the world.
But Daniel is a special case, not just because he carries all the data that they’ve stolen from WARDEX, but because he may be an “Experiencer,” aka someone who had contact with alien life in the past. It’s something that connects him with Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City meteorologist who one day, after a strange encounter with a red cardinal, starts speaking in foreign languages before she suddenly begins making strange clicks on live TV. After the episode, Margaret finds herself with strange empathic powers, which put her on a collision course with Daniel.
Disclosure Day finally starts to sing once O’Connor and Blunt unite and get to share the screen.
Most of Disclosure Day is actually a chase movie, with Daniel and Margaret evading WARDEX’s ruthless grunts, led by WARDEX head honcho Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). This aspect of Disclosure Day feels like the most energized filmmaking Spielberg has done in decades, and it’s at least his most propulsive movie since War of the Worlds. Daniel and Margaret’s journey has them engaging in high-speed car chases and leaping onto speeding trains, in a sequence that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Bond movie. Cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, Spielberg’s frequent collaborator, lends the camera and agile energy, while also bathing many of its more conspiratorial scenes in shadowy silhouettes and blinding lens flares. It’s a thrill to see the 79-year-old director flex his action bona fides and show that he’s still got it — and that he can still do it better than many of the up-and-comers who are still chasing his shadow. Even more so that he can do it with a wink — one particularly delightful scene features some physical slapstick that wouldn’t feel out of place in E.T. or one of Spielberg’s ‘80s films.
So much of Disclosure Day tickles that part of your brain that first fell in love with Spielberg films, and makes you recognize all his little hallmarks. That strange telepathic connection between Daniel and Margaret is like the E.T.-Elliott bond in E.T. The eerie technology that Scanlon uses to jump into people’s bodies has shades of Minority Report. And, of course, all the UFO revelations are inarguably descended from Close Encounters.
Daniel and Margaret both find themselves reaching into their past.
But Disclosure Day, miraculously, feels less like a series of nostalgic riffs on Spielberg classics than it is an evolution of the story he’s been telling since Close Encounters. Beneath all the thrilling action spectacle and old-school speculative sci-fi flourishes, there’s a deep, affecting thread of humanism throughout the film. This, of course, is unsurprising for the filmmaker constantly accused of employing cloying sentimentality in his movies. But Spielberg and his longtime collaborator and screenwriter David Koepp try to bridge the gap between the cynical paranoia inherent in disclosure and the earnest hopefulness of believing in life beyond Earth. Most of this is played out through Eve Hewson’s character, Jane, a former nun and Daniel's girlfriend, who gets roped into things when he goes on the run. The film’s attempt to connect religion, faith, and belief in the unknown is admittedly the most ungainly part of the movie, with Koepp’s script awkwardly trying to shoehorn in a religious metaphor that doesn’t totally work.
But despite some uneven plot beats and a supersized runtime, Disclosure Day zips by. The film, which is so cloaked in mystery as to be occasionally frustrating, does take a while to get started, but by the time Daniel and Margaret finally connect, it sings. O’Connor is a deeply likable true-blue Spielberg protagonist, while Emily Blunt plays slightly against type as a somewhat ditzy normal person who suddenly becomes imbued with a greater destiny. Domingo and Hewson are solid supporting players who hew slightly broad (which feels in line with Disclosure Day’s early-Spielberg energy), but Firth is the real standout as the deliciously sinister embodiment of the shadowy federal authority. Disclosure Day somewhat dances around politics — the film is set on the cusp of World War III, giving the movie an almost apocalyptic feeling — but it’s fascinating to see Spielberg portray these government stand-ins as dastardly, irredeemable villains. Disclosure Day draws some pretty clear lines between the good guys and bad guys, which butts up gently against its ultimate message that humanity can be trusted with the truth.
“Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know,” goes the mysterious message that Daniel and Margaret receive. It effectively spells out the movie’s message (not much of Disclosure Day is very subtle) — that humanity is beautiful in its capacity to accept, and perhaps embrace, the unknown. It’s quite a sentimental message to leave audiences with, but hey, that’s Spielberg.
