DISCLOSURE DAY
2026
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by David Koepp and Steven Spielberg
The last several years of Steven Spielberg's career, as many as eight years and three movies by my count, have been devoted to either tying up his loose ends, scratching entries off his bucket list, or both, starting with Ready Player One which, while opinions clearly vary, seemed to me like watching one of modern popular culture's chief architects asking us to walk away from the decaying edifice he'd helped build (we demurred); this continued with West Side Story (which doesn't count as nostalgic IPsploitation, apparently?), fulfilling Spielberg's long-held wish to make a musical; then he made The Fabelmans, his thinly-veiled autobiography about his six-decade love affair with the camera that likewise found him finally confronting head-on the parental issues that had informed so much of his output over those decades. Thus it frames the question: what does an artist do when they've already neatly boxed up their legacy, but, because they were so organized and responsible about it, they're still alive and able to make whatever art they feel like? "I never think about how many more I have," is the relevant Spielberg quote, which is an obvious lie, but one of Spielberg's announced post-Fabelmans projects was a potential remake of Bullitt, of all the whimsical wastes of time; though maybe you'd think, given the last scene of The Fabelmans, that he might have wanted to keep that momentum going and make the Western he's always talked about.
But what fixed his attention instead was Disclosure Day, a movie that you could charitably present as another legacy-interrogating effort, now putting a less-selfish, more-communal spin on one of Spielberg's most-beloved classics, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or which you could describe just as easily—with less charity, but not very much sarcasm—as a bizarre, time-lost attempt to cash in on the popularity of The X-Files as if everyone involved believed it was still 1997. With even less charity, but keeping it in 1997, it's Stupid Contact. To clarify, then: I like the movie; it's also Spielberg's worst movie in ten years, his worst not based on a true story (that is, his worst "it's a movie, not a film!" film) in twenty-nine, and almost-confusingly inessential, which maybe should be the expected outcome of an old filmmaker puttering about the place, looking for an outlet for the energies he didn't know he still had.
Now, what makes it seem like it isn't just puttering is that this project gets a story-by credit from Spielberg, who'd been prompted by some New York Times article about aliens—and, fine, maybe that fits in perfectly well with the "old man putters" thesis—but nonetheless, that's pretty unusual for Spielberg and, besides the obvious exception of The Fabelmans, you'd have to go back to A.I. for him getting a story credit, and back further, pretty much to Close Encounters—or at least to Poltergeist, which was an extreme reorientation of an earlier concept for E.T.—before that credit aligns with a movie Spielberg directed that he, himself, originated. So it seems like it must've been important to him, and the why is somewhat difficult to discern, besides his long-latent infatuation with the concept of friendly aliens—and yes, Disclosure Day's plot has been relatively jealously-guarded, but I don't think it's a spoiler to tell you what's made clear by implication probably as early as the first scene, namely that the aliens this movie is about aren't the antagonists. If we can correctly say the movie is "about aliens."
One may try grasping at straws: so while the general miasma of paranoia and powerlessness that's the air we breathe these days is plainly informing this movie about an evil conspiracy, the person I saw it with has fairly convinced herself it's some kind of specifically allegorical grappling with the news cycle since October 2023, and she'll be disappointed if I tell her when she wakes up that it turns out Spielberg wrote it in summer 2023, so maybe I won't even mention it, this being analogous (which I mean negatively) to the movie's moral quandary. But hell, it almost sounded persuasive—there's a trailer line in this movie, set in what sure seems like the autumn of 2026, that refers to a "79 year terror campaign," referring to Roswell but I assume somebody had to have had a conversation about it; both within the movie and in interviews, "empathy" is invoked, empathy that might even be forbidden "if you want to stay aligned with your friends and your belief systems"—but I think what it goes to is that the movie is so awkward about having themes and expressing them (the screenplay, incidentally, was written by David Koepp) that it feels like there ought to be some kind of reason a Jewish filmmaker, even Spielberg who will do this sort of thing, is blasting those themes through the channels of specifically Catholic characters and some really blaring Christian symbolism (also quieter Jewish symbolism that likewise happens to be Christian symbolism) as if to file the serial numbers off, and even doing Christianity kind of badly, considering the Catholic Church actually does have some stated guidance viz. aliens. But maybe it just made for better post-movie conversation about a movie that's only interesting in itself more intermittently than you'd prefer. Plus Spielberg apparently just... actually believes in alien coverup conspiracies now. Neato.
So: in an unexpected opening gesture for a story about aliens, we begin with a wrestler stomping on our faces in POV, but that's because this local match has been selected as the site of a handoff between Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) and Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the former of whom has spent eight years working for the vaguely-corporate conspiracy withholding the truth, while the latter is this conspiracy's steward, dedicated to exploiting alien technology from the shadows and maintaining the "stability" of a human civilization that might collapse if the truth were revealed. We've hit the ground what looks like running, then: Daniel's already stolen a jiggabyte of data from this organization, Wardex (much like "Disclosure Day," I feel this name sucks), and Noah has retaliated by kidnapping his girlfriend Jane (Eve Blankenship), though Daniel manages to abscond with Jane and the data thanks to having also pocketed a cylindrical "device" of various magical functions but which we may succinctly describe as an alien mind weapon. Meanwhile, 42 year old weathergirl with greater career aspirations Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is saying good morning and goodbye to her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) as she heads to work, a routine increasingly interrupted by inexplicable cognitive events such as reading minds and spontaneously speaking Korean until she goes on air and barfs out what we might suspect is extraterrestrial language, leading to her hospitalization; but when the "FBI" shows up, she has a flash that tells her they're lying and mean her harm, so out she goes. She soon drops her anchor of a spouse, Close Encounters-style, because he's ever-more-idiotically committed to a conventional medical explanation, and eventually Margaret is pointed by the counter-conspirator Hugo (Colman Domingo) on a line intersecting with Daniel's, but they both have to survive long enough to get together and, as it were, disclose.
For starters, I don't usually synopsize a movie in one paragraph, but Disclosure Day, 145 minutes long, is the rare Spielberg film that doesn't feel like enough has actually happened in it. Undoubtedly, some of that's thanks to how the film's two major threads are not, by any stretch, created equal: it's not strictly true that every scene with Margaret is better than every other scene, but it's almost strictly true that every scene with Blunt is better-acted, to the extent that the only reason for the "almost" is that O'Connor has a rescue/car chase where he keeps repeating "what am I doing?!" as a manic mantra to get him through it that's the closest our popcorn movie hero gets to having an approachable personality despite having reams of backstory applied to him and, theoretically, a more present and substantial scene partner than Blunt. Some of it is just conceptual, and maybe even a matter of taste: Margaret is simply the better Spielbergian protagonist, your average josephine who doesn't like her job or life or apartment or boyfriend in a low-key way, suddenly thrust into a frightening and tantalizing adventure into the extraordinary as she's confronted with her destiny as a Space Jesus. So the topline critical praise for Disclosure Day is correct: Blunt is terrific at finding a humane way through that, not least with an American accent that, shaming the vast majority of the useless dialect work that infests our movies, is actually a major pillar of her characterization, a flutey, even kittenish affectation that likely helped get her local TV gigs but which, at some point, she forgot to turn off, so it's simultaneously not really who she wanted to be but it's who she's become, and also tends to dovetail with a certain readily guessed-at childhood trauma that's kept her from solidifying any other way.* She's even good at stating much of this aloud; heck, Russell's rationalism-blinded dipshit is fine for as long as he's a going concern, the pair managing some nice interjections of humor into their mad situation.
And then there's O'Connor, who's aspiring to "rejected auditions for Fox Mulder," and I have a vague sense I'm supposed to think that O'Connor is one of our up-and-coming actors, but this certainly doesn't explain why that would be the case. He's been burdened (or vice versa) with Blankenship, and some of their ineffectiveness is their material, which is mostly extremely generic "we sure got ourselves involved in a conspiracy" stuff, though they're worse when it's not entirely generic: Jane is, in a way that feels egregiously transparent, in the movie at all mostly just to have been a former novitiate nun (not "solely" because she's also present to complicate that aforementioned rescue/chase, most of it as an unwilling antagonist, in what 1)is probably the best action-thriller scene here that 2)unfortunately emphasizes that the most memorable part of Blankenship's performance is her playing Firth controlling her body), and Jane's backstory is there to prompt the themes but Blankenship is so incapable of even pretending to buy into Jane's flat earth-adjacent disquiet over these (verbatim) "supreme beings," who can't help but crash their spaceships into our planet with downright Boeingesque regularity, that it elicits possibly the single worst line read of 2026, which could've at least been cut around to avoid the visible wheel-spinning as she tries to remember on her character's behalf why she's arguing with Daniel, eventually piping up (not verbatim, but not that far off) "oh, right! people would stop believing in God." It's at least "a conflict," except you'll remember I said that for Jane to become actively antagonistic to Daniel, Noah still needs to snatch her body via mind weapon.
Still a cool scene, even if it wouldn't hurt you to recalibrate any expectations you might have about all the cool scenes (it's more "thrills" than "action"). But in terms of visual construction, I think it'd be difficult to claim Spielberg has lost many steps. In fact, he may have regained some: between this and The Fabelmans, Spielberg and trusty DP Janusz Kaminski have been leading a small resurgence of the kind of widescreen framing and blocking you really don't see much of outside of movies from the actual 1970s, and while the movie can be dialogue-heavier than is good for it, Spielberg is doing it up awfully diligently with a jagged fragmentation such as even he sort of stopped doing at an almost precisely-identifiable moment in 1981, during the first act exposition dump (with shadowy, conspiratorial G-men, so maybe that was the reminder) in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even so, the camera's retained all its modern mobility, so we get one of the best highly-choreographed long-takes I've lately seen thanks to how actually unobtrusive it is, quietly but unmistakably building excitement as, unbeknowst to her, Margaret gets ever-stranger at her TV station. It might secretly be the film's single best sequence—a double-edged sword when it's in the first thirty minutes.
But despite the narrative thinness being noticeable, I don't think editor Michael Kahn's now-completed slow replacement by protege-I-guess Sarah Broshar has been. It clicks along energetically, and on occasion we get real showpieces, that subornation of Jane being primarily a creature of slick matching between Noah and his puppet victim. There's fun stuff otherwise, like another car chase that moves to a train, and of course the big thing you'd want out of your latterday Close Encounters would be the Spielbergian sensawunda, and Disclosure Day delivers on that, with an idea of how to present aliens that's actually quite novel, in the form of watchers in animal suits who behave more like the animals in a Disney princess musical than they do wildlife, and don't really look like wildlife either, thanks to what you could conceivably assert is productively bad CGI. Eventually we get to a resurrection of Margaret's hazy past brought about by the counter-conspiracy that genuinely does benefit from feeling kind of sinister, a good way to position a mystery that's still scary even if she does want to believe, and this gets Kaminski's most interesting photography or at least his most interesting treatments of Blunt, which is more-or-less the same thing. I don't believe I should have used the term "audiovisual construction": John Williams explicitly retired with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and while Spielberg has pulled him back in, what that amounts to is some appropriately/forgettably pensive bits, the main I thing I remember being, well, the exceptionally Indy-like action cues.
There are corny ideas here too: the not subtle (presumably non-diegetic?) switch of eye colors when Noah is taking over bodies is harmless, even if it's silly and unnecessary, and the denouement's "Spielberg reactions" are reaching self-parodying levels, though at least it still feels better coming from the source than a latterday imitator. But then there's stuff that does damage, like that "stealth sequence," we'll call it, that's been smooshed right up against the damn climax, so you'd think it could be going nowhere else besides "thrills," though what Spielberg actually sought was broad, goonish physical comedy that still barely elaborates into jokes, which is just as well since it arrives by way of a mechanic so stupid I feel terrible describing it (the mind weapon can make you and all your friends invisible to observers, but apparently cannot make itself invisible—no, seriously).
Might as well highlight that "spoiler," to prepare yourself for one of Disclosure Day's fundamental problems. There are two fundamental problems, and arguably the least is that its conspiracy of men is lousy and fuzzily-motivated and only sometimes, in Firth's performance, sufficiently sociopathic, explicitly disconnected from a government or governments, but not in the X-Files way that puts them above governments, so it often feels like the form of a paranoid thriller i being pursued with the substance of a fancy mall's loss-prevention department (hand to God, they never kill anybody, and they eventually just give up—one of them doesn't even want to give up, so petulantly storms off—which is probably thematic, but neither dramatic nor even narratively justified). I asked myself more than once what exactly would happen if the heroes called actual cops. They're likewise overly-vulnerable to Margaret's psychoflexis in a way that isn't that credible after the first time she's pulled the trick, and the specific form that trick takes would, I think, be as likely to enrage as to mollify. Also, more than once they're unable to conceive of the possibility of "rear exits." (Meanwhile, whether this is the same problem, or a different one, the movie will very occasionally allude to a Third World War brewing, as a form of parallelism or to up the stakes, shamelessly stolen from James Cameron and I wonder if this is what it's like watching the theatrical cut of The Abyss.)
The other problem, though, is what I suggested before: this movie feels wayyyy the hell out-of-touch, with the barest minimum effort having been expended to try keeping it in touch. The entire religion-and/or-status quo vs. aliens conflict itself feels out-of-date, and this thing's idea of the contemporary media environment is, to put it nicely, quaint, relying to a nearly-fatal degree on over-the-air television that is, at least, probably more cinematic than the alternatives. But it also treats what amounts to a flash drive with a YouTube channel on it as the sort of information whose provenance—in 2026—can be ascertained at basically a glance (plus their whole disclosure plan could be very fairly accused of "burying the lede"). But, since maybe that's stuff we should allow a movie, in its pursuit of being a movie, there'd remain an abiding sense of unreality to it all. Perhaps out of a desire to retain the primordial power conspiracy fiction had back when it was new—perhaps because filmmakers have finally heard that we're sick of "meta"—this movie might be the most ridiculously anti-meta thing I've ever seen in my life. It's fully dysfunctional: for instance, a woman can't identify a gray the moment she beholds it (its interrogation also immediately grips her heart in icy moral terror, because nobody's tortured anybody in centuries; reader, I'm sorry to say that my innocence would not have been shattered, though I might've been suddenly petrified by the FTL civilization's capacity for reprisal), and nobody besides conspiratorial insiders really even seems to have even a dim awareness of UFOlogy-related paranormal folklore and pop culture. The result is an alternate universe that's awfully hard to take seriously as a real place, a universe where not only did The X-Files never exist, neither did Steven Spielberg.
Score: 6/10
*Also Blunt, while fixing breakfast, places her butter dish that's been touching her counter directly atop the toast she eats, which might be a mistake and might be microcharacterization but either way it's disgusting.
No comments:
Post a Comment