By Thomas M. Puhr.
At a time when genre film has reached new heights of creativity and daring, audiences deserve so much more from one of the greatest directors….”
The story goes that Stanley Kubrick, in the early stages of adapting The Shining, phoned Stephen King one morning to expound on the nature of ghost stories. Aren’t all such tales inherently optimistic, he asked the horror author, because they assure us there’s an afterlife? Lightly paraphrased, this philosophy can apply to alien movies: Aren’t all such tales, even those in which humans become fertilizer, inherently optimistic because they assure us we’re not alone?
This cosmic peace of mind suffuses the early sci-fi releases of Kubrick’s friend and protégé, Steven Spielberg. Like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) or E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Disclosure Day (2026) looks to the stars not with fear but with something like rapture. But childlike joy will only get you so far. Despite some bravura sequences and an intriguing central premise, the legendary director’s return to sci-fi never quite reaches the transcendent, goosebumps-inducing heights of his best genre work.
The film begins in medias res, with a first-person shot that puts us in the shoes of a wrestler running toward his opponent in the ring. This image may feel out of place for a cosmic adventure—we’re far from the perfectly aligned planets that open 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), or even the dancing water microbes that introduce War of the Worlds (2005)—but it nicely encapsulates humanity’s warring impulses to both destroy (name a sport that better represents mindless fighting than pro wrestling) and empathize. Here is a film that implores us, within its opening seconds, to look through another’s eyes.
For some reason, this sporting event has been chosen as the drop-off point between Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) and a team of shady men in black led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). In exchange for the top secret data and mysterious alien technology Daniel has stolen from a government facility, Scanlon and company will return Daniel’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), whom they’ve kidnapped. This setup is ridiculous but fun; I eased back in my seat, ready for some of that Amblin magic.
Alas, the film is quickly bogged down by more narrative threads than screenwriter David Koepp (working from Spielberg’s story) knows what to do with. In addition to Daniel’s and Jane’s stories, we get those of Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City weatherwoman who inexplicably develops supernatural abilities and shares a metaphysical connection with Daniel; Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), a nun who taught Jane before the latter suffered a crisis of faith and left the convent; and Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), the good-guy counterpart to Scanlon who spends much of the screentime overseeing the mysterious construction of a suburban home in a warehouse. Oh, and all of these stories intersect against the backdrop of an impending third world war. (Vaguely prescient references are made to Russia and North Korea, but the United States mostly remains well-intentioned, even naïve: the America of E. T., not Minority Report [2002].)
The clumsiness with which Koepp and Spielberg jump from one subplot to another is kind of shocking—contrast Disclosure Day’s clunky pacing with that of Jurassic Park (1993), in which the duo seamlessly interweaved the characters’ disparate adventures—but I’ll admit that when the puzzle pieces finally locked into place inside that warehouse, the emotional payoff brought a tear to my eye. I’ll avoid spoilers, though the sequence indicates that our extraterrestrial guardians are here to guide us off the path to self-destruction. Ironic cynicism has rarely been this director’s thing (even A. I. Artificial Intelligence [2001]portrayed humanity as a cosmic snowflake: utterly unique). Whether this earnestness strikes you as charmingly optimistic or woefully tone-deaf will depend on your tolerance for schmaltz.
Since Disclosure Day mostly finds Spielberg working in popcorn entertainment mode, the film works best when he gets to show off his still-formidable action skills. His barnstormer set piece—in which our heroes’ car gets stuck to a speeding freightliner and dragged into the path of an oncoming train—is spectacularly exciting: just the kind of transportive, white-knuckle fun no one can do quite like him. For a few glorious minutes, my mind was laser focused on how Daniel and Margaret were going to escape that car. Nothing else mattered.
But even if we judge the film purely as a blockbuster, it still comes up short. John Williams’s score is moving but oddly underused. I didn’t realize how lovely it was until I sat down and listened to it while writing this review. The finale delivers plenty of expensive-looking UFO footage, but—like the characters—we experience it through newsroom monitors, TV screens, and cell phones. The commentary on our tech-saturated world is obvious, but there’s a disappointing lack of immediacy—a remove—to this stylistic choice. It’s simultaneously too much and too little. I want to witness the alien mothership up close and personal, not by looking over someone’s shoulder as they watch it on their cell phone.
Disclosure Day is far from a total disaster, but I’d be hard-pressed to recommend it over, say, Backrooms or Obsession. At a time when genre film has reached new heights of creativity and daring, audiences deserve so much more from one of the greatest directors to do it.
Thomas M. Puhr lives in Chicago, where he teaches English and language arts. A regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, he has published Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema with Wallflower Press.