Title: Disclosure Day
Describe This Movie Using One South Park Quote:|
CARTMAN: Ah, man, I had this crazy nightmare last night.
STAN: Really, what about?
CARTMAN: Well, I was standing out in a field, and I had this huge satellite dish sticking out of my butt. And then there was… hundreds of cows and aliens, and then I went up on the ship and Scott Baio gave me pinkeye.
Brief Plot Synopsis: The truth is out there. No, wait. It’s coming from inside the house!
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 2.5 smuggled orcas out of 5.
Tagline: “We deserve to know.”
Better Tagline: “It’s a [self-help] book!”
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) left his cybersecurity job at Wardex in the worst way possible: absconding with a bunch of super secret files and video footage. At the same time, Kansas City meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) appears to have spontaneously developed both clairvoyance and mastery of multiple languages. Both Kellner and Fairchild are players in the scheme of another Wardex defector, Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), to reveal the existence of alien intelligence to the wider world. Opposing them is Wardex head Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) and his private army.
Meanwhile, Mulder and Scully are nowhere to be found.
“Critical” Analysis: Steven Spielberg has always been optimistic about the prospect of extraterrestrial life.
And not just in the sense of, “what if alien life exists?” His movies on the subject outright assert that it does. Moreover, it will be benign — if not outright friendly — to humans. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, abductions were treated like big misunderstandings (“Our bad, Melinda Dillon. Here’s your son back”). The title character of E.T. is just a stranded explorer, and the alien in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull just wanted to get the hell off Earth. Can’t say I blame it.
Spielberg’s only venture outside of benevolent little green men was 2005’s War of the Worlds. Not coincidentally, it’s the only example that wasn’t at least partially his story. And even in that H.G. Wells adaptation, the bad guy aliens died at the end.
Disclosure Day is the natural conclusion to Spielberg’s alien obsession. It’s also a convenient (and occasionally ham-fisted) way for him to sound off on global events. In the film, North Korea has pushed us closer to war than at any other time “since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.” The setup is not unlike Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, which featured a hoaxed-up extraterrestrial galvanizing a world in crisis.
Here, instead of Ozymandias, you have Spielberg, who’s clearly alarmed by the current state of the world. This is represented most starkly by the conflict between Scanlon, who believes mankind is incapable of peacefully accepting the existence of life on other worlds. Set against him are the aliens, represented — uncomprehendingly, at first — by Margaret, who says the quiet part loud by channeling the visitors’ belief that empathy is an integral component of civilization.
It ain’t deep. But then, Spielberg has always favored bold statements over subtlety. That’s true whether you’re talking about politics or matters of faith. As for the latter, the viewpoint hewing most closely to Scanlon’s is Daniel’s girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson). Jane, a former nun, wonders what impacts “disclosure” will have on peoples’ beliefs. Fortunately, a wise old Indian nun sets her straight on that.
If Disclosure Day is distinct from his first two forays into this subject matter, it’s primarily a matter of urgency. Spielberg’s depiction of mankind as slaves to their smartphones isn’t exactly groundbreaking. But his ultimate assertion that learning about proof of alien visitation will somehow unite humanity is laughable to the point of naïveté. Buddy, the government just released a new batch of UFO files and we could barely be bothered to look away from our Survivor recaps.
Spielberg is still a master of pacing action, even in a movie that could use more of it. He upends some old tropes during a climactic confrontation, and we even get a Duel callback. He and DP Janusz Kaminski are also still big fans of shooting car chases. But the movie’s “race against time” tone works against the bigger message he’s trying to put forth. And for as long as this movie is, the ending is so laughably abrupt it ends up working against it.
But the performances are broadly decent. Blunt shoulders the load well overall, but there’s a weird blankness that comes over her during scenes where she’s required to be confused. Or fearful. Or determined. Hewson and Firth stand out because of their characters’ ambiguity. And in the case of Firth’s Scanlon, the change is subtle yet conveyed convincingly. O’Connor is a believable Everyman, though Domingo plays it a bit too messianic for my tastes. However, his back and forth with Firth, when it comes, is great fun to watch.
At this point, Steven Spielberg has nothing to prove. His filmography is mostly* unassailable, and Disclosure Day represents the culmination of several themes he’s been chewing on for a long time. Too often, however, it feels like the legendary director is reacting to a world moving at a pace faster than he’s comfortable with. Worse, one he may have lost touch with (does he really think you can bring a full-sixed backpack into a sporting event?)
*1941, Always, and War Horse notwithstanding.
Disclosure Day is in theaters today
