In a late scene in “Disclosure Day,” Noah Scanlen (Colin Firth) – the head of Wardex, a corporation charged with studying and concealing proof of alien life on Earth – has a conversation about the morality of that task with Hugo (Colman Domingo), a former Wardex employee turned defector. Hugo, along with a cohort of other ex-employees, is determined to disclose the existence of extra terrestrials to the world. Scanlen is determined to stop that disclosure by any means possible.
Hugo sees what Scanlen and Wardex are doing not only as an affront to freedom of information, but also as an attack on belief itself. When someone comes forward with a story about an alien encounter, it’s Wardex’s job to stamp that out. People want to believe, Hugo says, but they also want to be believed. All Scanlen’s doing is taking away their sense of wonder.
This conversation is taking place on the massive set of a house that Hugo has built (at this time, we don’t yet know why), and Hugo spends his days convincing former Wardex workers-turned-whistleblowers to do exactly as he says, when he says. He’s the director, you might say, of this entire operation.
So the scene works on two levels. By depriving people of the knowledge of the existence of alien life, Scanlen is taking away their belief in something bigger than themselves. And, if Scanlen takes on the role of producer in our little metaphor, he’s depriving Hugo of the opportunity to provide wonder to a larger audience. Wonder – the thing that Spielberg has built a career on. The movie metaphor – in addition to the fact that this is the first movie Spielberg has made about aliens since 2005’s “War of the Worlds – feels like classic Steve. To quote an internet parlance, we’re so back.
Back? Sure – but with some caveats.
It’s a tall order, asking the man who made “E.T. the Extra Terrestrial” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (the latter of which feels very relevant to this discussion) to reach those same heights again. “Disclosure Day,” while still a Spielberg movie – that is to say, immensely well-made and entertaining – falls short of those heights, failing to capture the specificity of character and the human condition that pushes his best work into the pantheon of greatness.
In the lead-up to “Disclosure Day,” Spielberg has made it clear that he believes not only that aliens exist, but that they have visited Earth. The film functions as speculation about what would happen if someone had evidence of that fact – indisputable evidence – to show to the world. Over the course of the film, we follow two storylines as they converge. Cybersecurity expert and ex-Wardex employee Daniel Killner (Josh O’Connor) and his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) are in possession of a number of classified documents and on the run, while meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) suddenly starts displaying psychic abilities that allow her to know the intimate details of strangers’ lives and speak different languages – including an alien language that no one else but Daniel can understand.
“Disclosure Day” is defined by its weighty ideas, whether that be about religion, about the ability of humanity to handle the existence of life beyond our own, about what sort of sacrifices are required – and of whom – for the greater good. But ultimately, so much of that complexity is pushed to the wayside for a far safer approach, leading to a sense of optimism by the film’s end that feels unearned. There’s a sense of inevitability to “Disclosure Day” that strips the movie of that essential Spielberg ingredient – wonder.
Daniel and Margaret serve as our conduits for that would-be wonder. We come to find out that they both had alien encounters as children, leaving them both imbued with certain abilities that were then activated later in life – Daniel with an extraordinary acumen for mathematics, and Margaret with an extrasensory perception of people. He’s logic, she’s empathy.
One of Spielberg’s biggest strengths as a storyteller (“Disclosure Day” is based on an idea by him and scripted by frequent collaborator David Koepp) is his ability to find hope without compromising on darkness. His movies aren’t often given credit for how thorny they can be, but part of the reason why things like the triumphant sequence at the end of “Close Encounters” – a movie where a depressed, angry man leaves his family in the dogged pursuit of something “greater” – is so wonderful is because we’ve spent so much time mired in the more difficult aspects of Richard Dreyfuss’ character. We need the dark to revel in the light.
“Disclosure Day” only scratches the surface of the darkness. The whistleblowers’ plans are backdropped by the nebulous idea of World War III (which feels especially vague in comparison with the very real indicators of that possibility we live with everyday). And while the film picks at something incredibly complex about what it would actually mean to be picked to be a conduit for an alien race – how equally special and violated that could make someone feel – it never fully takes the plunge into complication.
Daniel briefly mentions that when his mathematical genius manifested, it ruined his life, making it impossible for him to form any type of human connection until he met Jane (why Jane is a question that isn’t really answered, and the strength of the chemistry between O’Connor and Hewson isn’t enough of an answer on its face). In another moment, Daniel and Margaret relive a vision of what happened to them as children. As Daniel watches it unfold in front of him in real time, he begins to sob, begging the younger Margaret (Delaney Cuthbert) in the vision to not follow the aliens to her ultimate fate.
These flashes of internal conflict – and they are just flashes, over the course of 145 minutes – represent “Disclosure Day” at its best. Margaret ultimately gets more to wrestle with (Blunt turns in her best performance in years). In one of the film’s best scenes, she breaks her and Daniel out of a Wardex facility by wielding the words of the people that the security agents love most against them, alternating between her own mind and the minds of others. Koepp’s screenplay often feels a bit expository, but its moments like these where Blunt best sells the tension between Margaret’s desire to remain her own person, unburdened by the desires of others, and the grand responsibility she’s been handed.
For the end of the movie to work, Margaret and Daniel have to decide that exposing Wardex and the existence of alien life is worth any sacrifice they would have to make. But that transition feels weightless, skipping over any of the hard parts of the decision-making process. We know too little about Daniel and Margaret to really understand what this means to them, or how they moved past such trauma to a place of acceptance. Koepp’s script is propulsive, but the one thing its exposition and light philosophizing don’t make room for is characterization.
As a whole, “Disclosure Day” feels almost rote. You know where this is headed from the instant the movie starts, so the very least you could ask for is a few sticky, complex characters to take us on the journey – and that’s something that Spielberg, historically, excels at. But Margaret and Daniel – and Scanlen, and Hugo, and Jane – feel more like cyphers for ideas than real people. That zaps the film of energy, and the lack of specificity seeps into its every corner – at one point, we see millions of people across the country watching the news on their phone and believing every word and image that they see. A world where the masses trust in mainstream media? That is not the world we live in.
That all plays into the movie’s sense of optimism, which permeates so many of Spielberg’s films – and I’m not so much a cynic to say he’s wrong to have a little faith in people, or to believe in the people who want to hold our government accountable. But the lack of complexity in “Disclosure Day,” and the feeling that Spielberg is running this from an old playbook, makes it hard to find much to sink your teeth into – even if the ride is fun along the way.
