Disclosure Day

It is difficult to ever say that Steven Spielberg was ever at his zenith, because, frankly, he always has and always will be. But in 1999, it's fair to say Spielberg was riding high. Just a few days before he won his third Oscar for Saving Private Ryan (but controversially lost Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love), Spielberg appeared on an episode of Inside the Actor's Studio. The clip that has survived in the modern-day internet and goes viral every so often is the one in which host James Lipton pointed out the connection between Spielberg's parents and the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In essence, Spielberg's father was an engineer, and his mother was an artist. To communicate with the nearly arrived aliens, the humans use music produced with computers. Spielberg was clearly elated and told Lipton he had never realized that before.

However, my personal favorite moment was during the question-and-answer session near the conclusion of the episode in which Actors Studio students got to ask him questions. One student asked him two questions: one related to the act of listening, and one about whether or not he believed in aliens. After the chuckling from everyone had died down, Spielberg produced an elaborate, brilliant answer about the power of listening and how his own Jewish faith reminds him of the necessity to listen. He then paused, smirked, and calmly said, "I do believe in aliens."

Steven Spielberg has directed musicals, horror flicks, action, and, of course, science fiction, among others. He has done everything from the Peter Pan story to dinosaurs to the Holocaust, from animation to comedy. Yet just as Martin Scorsese is forever inextricably linked to gangster sagas, and Alfred Hitchcock is to thrillers what Michael Moore is to politically charged documentaries, Spielberg will never stop being tied to stories of aliens. We all know his alien films: the optimistic tale of family and friendship in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and cautious first contact in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as well as the horrors of what he described as an allegory to the reaction of 9/11 in War of the Worlds. He has never shied away from the possibility that we are not alone. (Even Indiana Jones met them.) After passion projects like West Side Story in 2021 and The Fabelmans in 2022, Spielberg has returned to them yet again, this time in Disclosure Day. 

If you were disturbed by the genocidal invaders of his adaptation of H.G. Wells' famous story, rest assured, Disclosure Day is more Close Encounters than War of the Worlds. It's a story that attempts to marry themes of truth and faith, however clumsily, all while trying to convince us that humans would stop killing each other if only aliens showed up to distract us all. The story focuses on two people: Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a meteorologist based in Kansas City,  and Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), a cybersecurity expert on the run. Kellner is whom we meet first in a somewhat peculiar opening at a wrestling match. We see that his girlfriend (Eve Hewson) has been taken hostage by a mysterious cabal led by Noah Scanlon, the leader of a corporation called Wardex that serves as a secret arm of the U.S. government and is played by Colin Firth. Kellner has in his possession some sort of powerful, non-man-made tool that Scanlon desperately wants. 

Our other main character is Fairchild, a meteorologist with aspirations to become a lead anchor. One morning before work, as she and her boyfriend (played by Wyatt Russell, the son of Goldie Hawn, the star of Spielberg's first theatrical film, Sugarland Express) discuss possibly packing up and moving to a new city, but their conversation is interrupted by a cardinal who presents itself before her and takes her breath away. Inexplicably, she suddenly can speak Russian, Korean, and even a unique language that might not be from our own planet. Her on-the-air alien speech causes herself to faint, and it also gets the attention of Scanlon and his gang. Simultaneously, a Wardex defector who wants people to know the truth about aliens, whether or not they have visited us before, and what Wardex has done to them, also desperately seeks Fairchild out while trying to match her with Kellner before it's too late. This man, named Hugo Wakefield, is played by Coleman Domingo.

Early reaction to Disclosure Day suggested it was his "best film in twenty years." I wouldn't put it that way. It's not as good as War Horse or The Post, for example, and the only film of his in the past twenty years that it is unquestionably better than is Ready Player One. (Yes, I liked Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.) Part of this is due to diminishing marginal returns; in essence, it's hard to top not only some of the alien classics already mentioned but a whole host of other work, especially when you consider he has been nominated for fifteen Oscars in the past twenty years alone for directing, producing, and writing. Another part of my somewhat muted response is the screenplay by David Koepp. Koepp, who also wrote the screenplay for Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, has always been one of the sharpest writers in Hollywood, but sometimes his dialogue here adds to the goofiness of the situations.

Goofiness or not, even respected thespians like Blunt and Domingo struggle to make sense of these lines, while others like Firth, an Oscar-winner, certainly make peculiar choices (in his case, by barely moving his lips when he speaks). Yet as summer popcorn entertainment in the vein of what audiences have come to love from a movie by Spielberg, Disclosure Day suffices. There are action-packed car chases and even an exciting moment involving a train. Yet as a truth thriller akin to something like The Parallax View or All the President's Men, it falls short.   

Still, it is a work of Steven Spielberg, and it's always a gift to see something he does. Along with his frequent collaborator Janusz Kamiński (his cinematographer since Schindler's List), he has a singular talent for making simple moments like men opening car doors in unison or a character looking off in the distance feel grand and operatic; this skill is one of the reasons he has remained the paramount director of Hollywood since he first broke out onto the scene. It's these typical Spielberg moments, like those chase scenes, that will send chills down your spine. If you can tolerate some of the more problematic parts of Disclosure Day, it's worth one more alien tale from the master of cinema.