Disclosure Day is in cinemas from Wednesday 10 June. Add it to your watchlist
Anyone who knows the slightest thing about cinema knows that the subject of extra-terrestrial life is something that has preoccupied Steven Spielberg for just about the entirety of his storied career.
With Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977 and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial five years later, the legendary filmmaker crafted arguably the two most seminal works about alien beings visiting Earth – a pair of stories rich with his trademark sense of wide-eyed wonder that redefined pop culture iconography forever (and which remain every bit as compelling and emotionally rewarding to this day.)
He dipped his toes back into similar (albeit also rather different) waters in 2005 with his take on HG Wells’s classic sci-fi tale The War of the Worlds, and now – another two decades on – he’s gone back to the well one more time. Disclosure Day marks a welcome return to summer blockbuster fare for the master of that particular art, and finds him once again asking cinemagoers how we might react if presented with incontrovertible proof of intelligent life beyond our solar system.
We should make it plain from the outset that this new film is not at the same level as those aforementioned 20th century classics. Where his masterful earlier works had a razor sharp focus, the script here – penned by regular collaborator David Koepp – has a clunky and unfocused quality that occasionally makes it difficult to truly fall under the film’s spell.
Meanwhile, in ways both good and bad, Disclosure Day feels a little old school and out of time, a relic of a previous Hollywood age that doesn’t have an especially current grasp of modern life and attitudes (and more specifically of the dwindling cultural significance of live television news.)
Our protagonists are Emily Blunt’s chirpy and ambitious TV weather presenter Margaret Fairchild and Josh O’Connor’s stoic whistleblower Daniel Kellner, two people with seemingly very different lives and personalities who – for reasons viewers are best left to discover on their own – are destined to be brought together in the race to finally inform the world that aliens have visited our planet.
We first meet the latter in a scene that plunges the audience immediately into the action. He is being ruthlessly pursued by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the head honcho of the shadowy organisation where he is employed, known as The Wardex Corporation. They have discovered he plans to leak deeply confidential files that prove a major government cover-up regarding UFOs and alien life dating back some 80 years, and their desperate attempts to stop him at any cost occasionally give the film the feel of a 70s-era paranoid thriller.
Our introduction to Margaret, on the other hand, is rather more otherworldly. As she is preparing for work one morning, she is paid a visit by an intriguing red cardinal bird, and in the aftermath of their brief interaction, almost instantly begins behaving very curiously. She makes bizarre clicking sounds, is gifted with the uncanny ability to read people’s minds and speak their languages, and is driven by an unstoppable urge to get to the bottom of her mysterious fate.
Before and after the pair are brought together, there are some exceptional sequences and moments that highlight why for so long Spielberg has been considered the unimpeachable king of entertaining big-budget filmmaking. The director still knows how to block and film action spectacle better than just about anyone, and one particular set piece involving a moving train is genuinely thrilling stuff – a nail-biting scene that ranks among the year’s very best.
The performances, too, are first rate. O’Connor once again proves he has all it takes to be a modern day movie star, while Eve Hewson is terrific as his character’s religiously conflicted ex-nun girlfriend, who also gets caught up in the chase. But top marks go to Blunt, who has the most challenging physical and emotional role and turns in arguably the finest performance of her career.
Of course, Spielberg is still capable of producing the classic moments of magical awe that have always defined his films, helped here by another reliably stirring score by his oldest collaborator, composer John Williams. But while there is an impressive sense of mystery for much of the film, the way the narrative unfolds doesn’t always feel as satisfying or exciting as it could.
Spielberg and Koepp have attempted to pack a lot in here – with themes ranging from the lasting power of buried childhood memories to the importance of the pursuit of truth to the possibility of reconciling belief in alien life with religious faith – and the result can sometimes feel like a film that gestures at profundity without ever quite delivering it.
Meanwhile, although the earnestness of its closing section has a certain charm – and will no doubt have a deeply emotional effect on many of those with a longstanding admiration for Spielberg’s work – it also perhaps veers from his characteristic sentimentality into outright cheesiness in a way that his best work always managed to avoid. And without straying into spoilers, the film ends just as it’s getting to its most interesting part, with some viewers bound to be frustrated that we don’t get to see what happens next.
Disclosure Day is an imperfect film, then, but it is also one with no shortage of great moments and the undeniable stamp of the great Steven Spielberg. And if that doesn’t make a summer blockbuster worth checking out, then frankly what does?