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This article is part of Spielberg Week, Slate’s seven-day celebration of Steven Spielberg.
At my press screening of Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, the logo of Spielberg’s production company Amblin Entertainment—the famous image from E.T. of a child on a bicycle in silhouette against a full moon, the swaddled space traveler of the title peering from the bike’s basket—earned a smattering of anticipatory applause. The spontaneous clapping showed the affection and esteem with which Spielberg is regarded by cinephiles, sure. But that nostalgic image of boy, bike, and moon also served as a reminder of just how long Spielberg has been circling around this particular thematic fixation. Forty-four years after he imagined the friendship between a suburban grade-schooler and a stranded alien, here was the now-79-year-old filmmaker again taking a crack at a story in which humanity learns for the first time that we are not alone.
As a matter of fact, E.T. represented not the beginning but merely one early stop on the journey of Spielberg’s lifelong obsession. If you start with Firelight, the now mostly lost 8 mm feature the filmmaker wrote and directed in high school, the man is now in his 62nd year of making movies about other life forms coming to Earth, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Richard Dreyfuss’ protagonist in Close Encounters, obsessively building his mashed-potato mountain, is this artist’s version of a Rembrandt self-portrait: a subject he has returned to again and again throughout his life, each time making it a different expression of his craft. Now, with the extraterrestrial-themed thriller Disclosure Day, Spielberg colors the youthful wonder of E.T. with the more melancholic, at times pessimistic tone of some of his more mature work. A recent-ish film of his that kept coming to mind as I watched it was 2002’s Minority Report, another sci-fi thriller that, like Disclosure Day, is essentially one long chase, yet offers ample time for reflection on the nature of fate and the human condition.
Disclosure Day begins in the medias of some suspenseful and at first disorienting res: In the crowd at a wrestling match, a young man, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), is tensely negotiating with some men-in-black types about the handover of a mysterious backpack. It soon emerges that these operatives have kidnapped Daniel’s girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) and are holding her hostage until he surrenders the pack’s top-secret contents. The man in charge of the backpack-seekers is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of a shadowy government contractor called Wardex. As Danny explains to Jane during their subsequent escape from these pursuers, he and a group of former Wardex employees have left the company with stolen samples of the technology that Wardex exists to keep secret: devices found in the wreckage of alien spaceships over the course of the past century, beginning in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. The plan of this underground rebel group, led by former Wardex higher-up Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), is to release seven decades’ worth of classified data in one earthshaking information dump—the “disclosure day” of the title.
The rest of the film takes place more or less over the course of those 24 hours, as Daniel and Jane flee to a safe house that, given Scanlon’s ability to “dive” into other people’s consciousness at will using the alien tech, turns out to be far from safe. Meanwhile, in Kansas City, Missouri, an ambitious TV-news meteorologist, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), finds herself acquiring inexplicable new powers. After an encounter with a cardinal that flies in through her kitchen window, she can suddenly glimpse the inner world of each new person she meets, seeing the context of whatever internal struggle or family conflict is on their mind. She is also suddenly fluent in both Russian and Korean—and, even more bizarrely, as comes to light when she gets in front of the camera for her daily weather report, can speak a strange language of clicks and whirs that no one, including Margaret, can make sense of. That is, not until Domingo’s Hugo plays the clip for Danny, whose ears are immediately able to magically translate the inscrutable sounds into English.
It becomes clear that Margaret and Danny are linked in some way, each providing a key to deciphering the aliens’ message to humankind: She can speak their language without understanding it, while he can understand it without speaking it. Hugo’s job is to keep them both alive until they can be brought together to resolve the question of what that message might be. It’s a premise that leaves some obvious questions unresolved (why were these two in particular chosen as conduits of interplanetary communication? And how does the seemingly omniscient Hugo comprehend all this without being a chosen conduit himself?).
But while you’re watching Disclosure Day, questions about story logic fall by the wayside like the burner phones that Danny keeps discarding out of car windows. For all its thematic ambition, including vast questions about geopolitical conflict, unresolved childhood trauma, humankind’s potential for both good and evil, and the future of religious faith in a universe where Earth is not the only populated planet, this movie is at heart a rip-roaring cross-country chase. One bravura sequence has Margaret’s car crashing into a moving train and getting carried along next to it, so that she and Daniel must leap from car to train like the heroes of an old silent-movie action serial. A late action scene combines the mind-bending powers of the alien technology with conceptual slapstick comedy: What if you conducted a raid on a rebel outpost you couldn’t even see?
At two hours and 25 minutes, Disclosure Day has moments of bagginess, galumphing rather than sprinting toward a philosophical and emotionally resonant climax that might be thought of as “E.T. phone home” on a global scale. But the screenplay, by David Koepp—Spielberg’s collaborator on the first two Jurassic Park movies, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull—builds out a rich enough world to carry the audience along even through the more puzzling stretches, like a late flashback sequence that takes Margaret back to a moment in her childhood she has never before understood (and that this viewer, for one, still doesn’t).
There’s an odd asymmetry to the script’s character development, in that some secondary characters emerge as more distinct individuals than the protagonists. Hewson’s Jane, for example, is off-screen for much of the movie’s middle stretch, but she gets a fuller backstory as a onetime would-be nun than O’Connor’s sympathetic but opaque tech whiz Danny. (Elizabeth Marvel has a wonderful few scenes as the mother superior at Jane’s former monastery.)
As for Blunt, she gets to play the kind of character she rarely takes on—someone who isn’t hypercompetent and stoic (though Margaret does start out trying to feel that way), but is rather struck dumb by awe and gratitude at the miracle unfolding before and within her. Margaret essentially spends the entire movie tripping on the fact that she can suddenly sense strangers’ thoughts and glimpse previously unknown dimensions of reality, including visits to her own past self. Koepp’s dialogue doesn’t overexplain the content of these internal revelations, which makes the moments when Margaret speaks about them all the more affecting, especially in scenes with her loving but unsurprisingly confused boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell).
Firth’s amoral and ruthless Noah Scanlon starts out as a stock villain, if an enjoyably reptilian one. But in a late-movie arc, Firth gets a chance to show how decades of devoting his life to a cover-up of shameful acts have taken a toll on Scanlon’s body and soul. The most maddeningly underdeveloped character is Hugo, whom we see mainly as the rebel leader masterminding the disclosure-day plan from a remote location. Domingo’s innate warmth and the gentle authority of his voice make him credible as a leader you’d quit your job and go into hiding for, but we’re left to infer on our own how Hugo gained what appears to be a deeper grasp of the aliens’ culture, their powers, and their motivations in interacting with Earthlings than anyone else in the world.
At this point in his career, noting Spielberg’s mastery of craft is like saying that Michelangelo wielded a mean chisel. But Disclosure Day is one of those movies, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another last year, for which noting the cinematic prowess at work constitutes a part of the pleasure: the innovatively designed freeway chase; the placement of characters within the frame in a way that tells us more than dialogue could about what they’re feeling; the effortlessly kinetic editing of Sarah Broshar, who takes over for her mentor Michael Kahn, the 95-year-old who has edited nearly every previous Spielberg feature; the ever-mobile-yet-never-jittery camerawork by another longtime collaborator, the cinematographer Janusz Kamiński; and a score by even-longer-time collaborator John Williams, with a mournful symphonic hook that serves, after a few reprises, as an old-school Hollywood movie theme.
All this way into a review of a movie about a human encounter with aliens, and I’ve barely mentioned the little green men—in this case, from what brief glimpses we get of them on grainy old security footage, dull grayish-green beings of indeterminate (and irrelevant) gender. Real-life followers of the history of alleged encounters with UFOs—or, as they’re now called, UAPs, for “unidentified anomalous phenomena”—may note with pleasure that Spielberg makes no attempt to redesign the look of the space travelers as they have typically been described by people who claim to have encountered them: smaller than humans for the most part, with large heads, spindly limbs, and huge, wide-set dark eyes (think the creatures that emerge tentatively from the glowing orb of a spaceship at the end of Close Encounters, played by children in full-body costumes).
For nearly the entirety of Disclosure Day, the aliens are seen only on small, blurry screens, the isolated real estate of one individual’s laptop or phone. As the clock ticks down to the planned data dump of the title, the audience’s excitement has to do with the knowledge not only that all of humanity is about to be told of a paradigm-shifting discovery, but that all eight billion of us will learn this together and at the same time—on TV screens and not in movie theaters, to be sure, but in a spirit of communal watching not unlike the one being experienced in that same moment by ticket buyers to Disclosure Day. At the dawn of A.I., as we seem to be witnessing the collapse of a shared public reality (a phenomenon Disclosure Day acknowledges without really grappling with), this movie ends on a tribute to the redemptive power of coming together in front of a screen, or throughout a planet full of billions of screens, to witness in common a world-changing truth. Spielberg sees such a scenario not as utopian but as life-affirming and necessary: The young female anchor who weeps in wonderment as she takes in the full measure of what has happened is a stand-in for all us weepy saps in the theater, even as we note that ideally she should have done more stringent fact-checking before the story went on air.
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