Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’ Is a Surprisingly Baffling Sci-Fi Misfire

Few filmmakers have done more to shape the landscape of science fiction than Mr. Steven Spielberg. From his early wunderkind films like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and mid-career entries like A.I., War of the Worlds, and Minority Report, Spielberg built a career on transforming ethereal, otherworldly mysteries into tales of wonder that explored humanity’s connection to something larger out there. Which makes his latest entry into the genre, Disclosure Day – a film that’s equally dull, disjointed, and more often than not just plain head-scratching – all the more disappointing.

The film’s central premise is surprisingly straightforward. Aliens exist. We know this fact from the very jump. The mystery here isn’t whether humanity is alone in the universe, but whether a small faction of whistleblowers, including Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), and local would-be journalist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) can prove extraterrestrial life has been hidden from the public for most of modern history. It’s a setup tailor-made for Spielberg’s sensibilities, blending science-fiction spectacle with conspiracy-thriller mechanics, but what unfolds is a surprisingly clumsy and overlong race to reveal a truth the audience already knows from literally the very first frame of the film. And yet, Disclosure Day constantly behaves as though it is guarding some earth-shattering revelation.

Scene after scene revolves around characters promising and being promised that answers are just around the corner. Revelations are teased. Explanations are delayed. Entire stretches of the film seem designed around the assumption that audiences will remain engaged simply because information is being withheld. Rather than generating intrigue, the screenplay from David Koepp, working from a story by Spielberg himself, creates the sensation of simply being strung along.

For his contribution, Koepp remains one of Hollywood’s most frustrating screenwriters. At his best, he’s delivered some bangers in the form of Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, and, most recently, Black Bag. At his worst, he gave us Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the reviled 2017 Mummy reboot, and Jurassic World: Rebirth. Unfortunately, Disclosure Day lands much closer to the latter category; a screenplay riddled with baffling character decisions, inconsistent motivations, and conflicts that seem to appear and disappear whenever the story requires them.

Colin Firth’s shadowy government operator Noah Scanlon is perhaps the clearest example. One moment he’s presented as a ruthless figure willing to do whatever it takes to preserve secrecy. The next he’s inexplicably allowing key opportunities to slip through his fingers. His actions aren’t dictated by a coherent worldview or strategy so much as the screenplay’s immediate needs, further muddled by a half-baked subplot involving grief over his late wife. It’s difficult to become invested in the thrills of a thriller when the sense of danger feels so arbitrary and slapdash.

That same artificiality infects much of the supporting cast. Colman Domingo brings his usual dramatic gravitas to #AlienTruther Hugo Wakefield, though the character spends much of the film functioning as little more than a voice on the other end of a telephone, staging some bizarro house party of sorts. Meanwhile, Eve Hewson as a girlie named Jane is saddled with a painfully underdeveloped but I guess thematically essential subplot involving the existential battle between faith and extraterrestrial life. As Kellner’s girlfriend and a former nun, Jane wrestles with whether proof of alien existence would fundamentally challenge prevailing religious belief – after all, how can both God and aliens exist? It’s a potentially interesting idea if tackled with any real depth, but instead is just something tacked on to the screenplay in an attempt to fein thematic intrigue; one that’s explored with all the hurried investigative nuance of a BuzzFeed listicle.

The film’s strongest dramatic material belongs to Emily Blunt, who is quite good here. As Margaret, a weather reporter who suddenly develops strange abilities ranging from unexplained linguistic fluency to near-omniscient intuition, Blunt is one of the few actors in Disclosure Day who manages to convincingly convey any signs of internal life beneath the screenplay’s run-here-then-run-there mechanics.

Yet even here, the movie struggles to establish meaningful rules. The source of her abilities, the timing of their emergence, and their ultimate significance all feel frustratingly arbitrary. It’s emblematic of the film’s broader problem: Spielberg wants us to marvel at the mystery, while the screenplay continually gives us few reasons to believe in it.

Josh O’Connor doesn’t fare much better. As Daniel Kellner, O’Connor spends much of the film reacting to information rather than driving events, leaving one of contemporary cinema’s most enigmatically talented actors stranded inside a lead role with surprisingly little dimensionality. It’s not that he or anyone else really is bad in any sense, but few of the characters feel fully realized enough to leave much of an impression.

What’s particularly frustrating is that Spielberg has successfully navigated this exact territory before. He’s effectively delivered extraterrestrial wonder with E.T. and Close Encounters. He’s hinged sci-fi thrillers on conspiracies, hidden truths, and protagonists pursued by powerful institutions in the likes of Minority Report and brought a world to the brink of disaster with War of the Worlds. The difference is that revelations in these films actually affect the plot. Every answer creates a new question. Here, characters spend most of the movie promising answers are coming soon. The mystery doesn’t evolve so much as it stalls on its way to its very inevitable and not at-all-shocking conclusion.

And yet, frustratingly, there are glimpses of the 79-year-old director’s age-old magic. When Spielberg finally stops worrying about the mechanics of the plot and leans into the awe of first contact, the movie finally comes alive. The problem is that this occurs roughly 130 minutes into his 145 minute feature. At to his credit, the closing stretch contains moments that recall the sense of wonder that made Spielberg the defining science-fiction filmmaker of his generation. In these fleeting moments, you can feel the movie reaching toward something transcendent. But still comes up short. For a movie about the greatest revelation in recorded human history, everything just ends up feeling rather low-energy, zapping the wind from its own sails with one bizarre narrative choice after another.

At nearly two and a half hours, Disclosure Day often feels inert. Characters race from location to location, evade capture through increasingly implausible means, and spend enormous amounts of time discussing information we either already know or strongly suspect. There’s faint whiffs of wonder here and there but they’re buried beneath layers of hacky exposition, narrative contrivance, and Koepp’s baffling screenwriting choices.

Disclosure Day ultimately feels less like a filmmaker pushing himself toward new discoveries than one attempting to recreate emotions and story beats that once came naturally to him. For a storyteller who practically invented the modern sci-fi blockbuster, Disclosure Day feels surprisingly content to coast on familiar ideas and old tricks. There are flashes of the Spielberg magic that made so many of us fall in love with movies in the first place, they’re just buried inside an idea that’s lacking in novelty and execution. Which in itself feels a bit alien.

CONCLUSION: Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day‘ only occasionally recaptures the sense of awe that made him one of science fiction’s defining filmmakers, but those moments are buried beneath a baffling screenplay that fails to hold up under the slightest scrutiny. Despite a talented cast and flashes of vintage Spielberg wonder, this overlong conspiracy thriller never satisfyingly arrives at the truth it’s so doggedly chasing.