As the world spirals toward nuclear armageddon, a rogue scientist, Daniel (Josh O’Connor), is on the run, determined to blow the lid on the activities of an unscrupulous corporation, Wardex.
Wardex has hidden evidence of extraterrestrial life, and has used the alien race’s technology for its own ends.
When a local TV reporter, Jane (Emily Blunt) starts speaking in an alien language on a live broadcast, Margaret can understand what she is saying.
Drawn by an unknown impulse, Jane seeks out Daniel, and they head to Kansas City where a secret group of ex-Wardex employees are developing a plan to share Wardex’s secrets with the world…
Before I had a moment to sit with Disclosure Day and how I felt about it, I heard a voice from the back offer a short condemnation:
“That sucked.”
I felt both a desire to solidify my own reaction, and a sense of hopelessness - that dismissive voice sounded young.
The movie has not failed - and box office success is not the arbitrator of quality.
But I still feel a shade depressed.
DId I love the movie? No.
But it did something most movies these days do not.
It sat with me.
Its desire to find hope, to believe in the collective good, that mankind can save itself from the oncoming forces of environmental decline and fascism - there was something powerful there, something that deserved more consideration than “that sucked”.
Disclosure Day sees Steven Spielberg returns to the themes of his earlier works about alien beings, E.T.and Close Encounters of The Third Kind, but by way of the encroaching cynicism of his latter films.
By the end of the film, Spielberg ends on a sequence foregrounding a renewed sense of empathy.
You feel a filmmaker seeing the encroaching calamity of contemporary life - and for most of the runtime, you might think he has been subsumed by it.
As it feels like the film is heading for some kind of confrontation, the film counters - violence is averted, its energy dissipated.
The forces of mass media are redirected toward a moment of mutual revelation.
The cast are solid - I was particularly taken with Colin Firth’s villain, an obsessed CEO cracking under both the roll of the technology he abuses, the weight of the humanity he has given up to possess and hide it.
There is a chilly resolve beneath the familiar voice, a directness to his stare - Firth feels genuinely unmoored, and it is a disturbingly effective casting against type.
The film features a few solid action beats - there is a great set-piece involving a crashed car against a train, and an extended one-take that was so effective I did not notice it until someone pointed it out on social media.
I have dismissed Spielberg’s recent work, and missed a good chunk of it. After Disclosure Day, I want to go back and make up the gaps.
He might not be the same filmmaker he was, but that is the nature of things.
On the evidence of Disclosure Day, he is not resting on his laurels or just keeping busy - this is a filmmaker who is still engaging with the world, and trying to create art that reckons not just with the world as it is, but as it could be.
