By When a master filmmaker like Steven Spielberg makes a new movie, any cinephile feels almost obliged to pay attention. Spielberg has dazzled audiences with thrilling action and soaring emotion throughout his career in equal measure. He created the summer blockbuster season with Jaws and helped expand it with his Indiana Jones trilogy and by providing advice to friend George Lucas on his Star Wars series.
The excitement is even more palpable with Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s first foray into sci-fi in eight years and first return to aliens since 2008. Spielberg directed some of the most influential alien flicks of the 70’s and 80’s with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. and bringing his first original story in the subgenre since then was all the more exciting. Thus, Disclosure Day lands all the more disappointing due to its systemic failures.
To be sure, there is no arguing Disclosure Day doesn’t demonstrate Spielberg’s filmmaking craft remains at a high level. Often feeling like a compilation of his aesthetics across decades of directing action sci-fi pictures, Disclosure Day is replete with captivating visuals. Whether its a camera panning in through a window to focus on a character in the background, cross fading the heads of two characters observing each other through a mirror, or zoom outs as the music swells, Disclosure Day readily reminds you of everything that Spielberg has added to 20th century American movie making. Not only does he harken to his prior alien works, but there is even a car chase reminiscent of Indiana Jones and the smooth sleek dark color palates remind of Minority Report.
Speaking of music, and part and parcel with this greatest hits motif, John Williams scores the work. No one would call it his finest hour and none of the themes truly stand out in his body of material, yet it does sound one of his fresher scores in recent memory. Spielberg and Williams’s partnership is one of the more iconic ones in American film history, and seeing it resound here together is a treat.
Yet perhaps it is all of the merits that make Disclosure Day‘s demerits more crushing. The story walks familiar territory with Daniel (Josh O’Connor) dodging a quasi-private quasi-governmental agency with evidence that aliens exist. He plans to disclose this information to the world, but is held back due to his leader Hugo’s (Colman Domingo) urging and his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) fear that such information will cause global chaos due to potentially destroying people’s faith in God. This sets up a theme of science vs religion, one of many themes painfully underdeveloped by the haphazard script.
Burdened by an enormity of plot, even at nearly two and a half hours, Disclosure Day fails to spend screentime efficiently. With multiple characters and ideas juggled, the movie drops nearly every ball by the end. While it attempts to carve a decent pace to avoid bogging itself down, the final edit gives short shrift to any meaningful character development. So often, the movie tells you what to think of the characters and situations without actually showing you those things.
Daniel has apparently struggled with disconnect since being a teenager due to a weird gift with numbers rearing its head, but this is only communicated because he tells this to Emily Blunt‘s Margaret. We get no sense of his life at all prior to the events of the movie, his relationship with Jane, or what his wants and desires were and how the film’s occurrences effect that. The result is a hollow plot device rather than a real person, muting the emotional climax when revelations of the past are finally made.
Jane is revealed early on as an ex-nun officiate and this is shown to be a shock to Daniel. Though precisely why it is is left a mystery, and is never resolved. The edit barely features Jane’s character past the halfway mark outside of a lone scene of her talking again with her nun teacher that attempts to continue the religion throughline. Yet another casualty of the sloppy writing,
Margaret suffers the same issues, set up as a weather anchor who suddenly starts getting inexplicable knowledge and is compelled to seek out Daniel. Aside from some jokey dialogue with her boyfriend played by a decent Wyatt Russell, her character and relationships and motivations are woefully underbaked as well. One gets the sense that five hours of material exist that might better explain and develop the characters and ideas, but the final cut fails at all of that.
Spielberg’s call for empathy and unity as a means of saving humanity are certainly heartfelt. And aspects of the final act work purely because he knows to cinematically convey these emotions and ideas. Yet for the things it does right, the script lets it down with its painful telegraphed choices of telling the audience about something and never giving room to experience these somethings.
The plot is also absurdly silly in many aspects. Conspiracy thrillers always take on a fantastical nature requiring a suspension of disbelief. Disclosure Day pushes this beyond a breaking point though, with characters able to get away with all manner of unplausible acts. This might not have mattered if the characters were developed right and there was true emotional investment. Without those present, the holes sink Disclosure Day utterly.
The sad reality is Disclosure Day is shockingly bad at its core. Because there are talented performers, set designers, and directing, Disclosure Day is still a passable work. It reminds of Spielberg’s better movies. Yet, the biggest disclosure in this film’s release is that Spielberg has hit his lowest point as a filmmaker since Crystal Skull. In an already wildly inconsistent career, David Koepp has hit another low with his script. Disclosure Day is a movie that sacrificed everything on the altar of plot machinations and is all the worse for it.
Rank Disclosure Day on Flickchart now and tell us what you think below!
