Review by Elizabeth C. Bunce
Full disclosure, since we’re doing that: I’m not the biggest fan of Close Encounters of the Third Kind or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but their status as classics in the alien genre is undisputed. And I enjoyed Disclosure Day a lot more than I expected. Director Steven Spielberg’s latest look at the first contact theme is not his best, but it’s more fun than you’ve heard. Disclosure Day suffers from a lot of things, especially its bizarrely portentous marketing campaign featuring Spielberg’s pronouncement of the film’s importance, which sets up expectations that the movie can’t possibly satisfy. There have been countless iterations of the theme of humanity’s first contact with extra-terrestrials since Melies’s A Trip to the Moon in 1902. Is Disclosure Day the best? The most fun? The most definitive? Definitely not. But it does have a typically-Spielbergian curiously clunky title, so there’s that. But that title again sets up an expectation for a different sort of story than what we’re ultimately given—this isn’t a grand global event like we saw in Close Encounters. It’s more of an midrange action flick focused on two characters on the run from a powerful, shadowy agency (but not the government! Apparently that’s important…?) determined at all costs to keep their secret… secret.
Think of this instead in terms of another classic alien movie: Escape to Witch Mountain, but with grownups. Maggie Fairchild (Emily Blunt) and Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) are two “alien experiencers” whose paths cross via some unexplained alien powers that give Daniel a neurotic complex and Maggie strange, pusher-like psychic abilities. When the film opens, we see Daniel absconding with secret alien intel in a weird attempt to foil the (checks notes) kidnapping of his ex-nun girlfriend (Eve Hewson) by the shadowy non-governmental agency, led by Colin Firth’s Noah Scanlon. Meanwhile, weather reporter Maggie is delivering her usual morning forecast when her sleeper alien gifts are abruptly and inexplicably activated, and she accidentally outs herself as the alien messiah. Maggie’s newfound powers lead her straight to Daniel, and the two set off to expose the truth to the world. …After they figure out what, exactly, that truth is. And like Escape to Witch Mountain, they have allies: a competing shadow organization determined to help expose the Truth About Aliens to the world, led by Coleman Domingo’s Hugo Wakefield. Along the way they dodge Scanlon’s operatives (and occasionally an astral-projection of Scanlon himself, using the forbidden alien tech for his own shadowy purposes), get in car chases, foil nefarious schemes, revisit childhood trauma, and assorted other sci-fi shenangians.
The story is a little zany and has the potential to be a fun adventure, if it weren’t taking itself so darn seriously. Non-Governmental Baddie Colin Firth delivers a solid performance as the menacing establishment villain, although his characteristic soft-spoken charisma offers the movie more gravitas than it really deserves. Blunt never disappoints in her latest sci-fi heroine role, easily switching between surprise, panic, and otherworldly serenity as she barrels along on the journey. Wyatt Russell appears all too briefly as Maggie’s supportive but baffled boyfriend. It’s far less intimate than E.T., but in league with episodes of The X-Files or Mercury Rising, with the tone (if not the depth) of Minority Report, although the suspense never quite reaches that level of urgency.
Even if you set aside any expectations that the name Spielberg attaches to the movie, there are some problems. A lot is left out—not simply left to the audience’s imagination, but literally unexplained, like who these rival agencies actually are and why they’re in charge of anything, or how the alien tech they use works (how did it make Maggie psychic? And if the aliens can do that, why do they need two bumbling humans to share their message with humanity? Oh, and what is that message, anyway?). Why don’t the aliens themselves ever appear as characters, and why did the only two people on Earth they’ve handpicked for this mission just conveniently happen to be Americans? Likewise, some of the setpieces are just strange—why does Rival Alien Agency #2 need to build a perfect replica of her childhood home in order to “activate” Maggie’s powers—which seem pretty active already on their own? And why is Spielberg obsessed with showing audiences scenes of traumatic experiments performed on and by aliens? By the way, which kind of encounter was this anyway? First, second… and wasn’t that lingo so important in the 1970s important enough to reference here?
This isn’t movie with a profound message. But even if it were, it could also benefit from moments of true fun and wonder (like Richard Dreyfuss’s mashed potato mountain sculpture). Efforts to inject that wonder end up more traumatizing than anything. The aliens disguise themselves (badly, with clunky CGI) as fairytale woodland creatures to perform terrifying experiments on helpless children without parental consent, and we’re supposed to be OK with this, even though the children—and the adult survivors—clearly aren’t.
The first act of Disclosure Day is the strongest, when we’re most engaged in watching the pieces of the mystery unfold. The story begins to falter in the final act, when the varying threads don’t quite come together. The ending feels frenetic and rushed, as if the writers belatedly remembered that the title should make sense. Yet, I enjoyed it for what it is, and not what the ads and title told us it was going to be. All in all, Disclosure Day is worth watching to see what Spielberg had in mind for his latest alien movie, and to enjoy the performances by the lead characters. We like Emily Blunt. We like Wyatt Russell. Everyone likes Colin Firth. Who doesn’t like aliens? It’s not the next E.T. (or Escape to Witch Mountain), but it’s an entertaining couple of hours. Toss some popcorn in the microwave, dim the lights, and chill out to a movie that doesn’t expect a whole lot from you. What else do you have going on? Disclosure Day is now streaming on Peacock.
