Review: Disclosure Day

This article contains spoilers.

Only once before in his decades-long career has director Steven Spielberg opened one of his films with a point-of-view shot: his feature film debut, Duel (1971), about a travelling salesman who is pursued by a vindictive fuel truck driver, begins with a car reversing out of a garage and speeding down a suburban street, the camera providing the audience with protagonist David Mann’s—or more accurately, his car’s—POV. Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s latest picture, begins similarly, the perspective that of a professional wrestler down on the ring canvas and looking up at the ceiling lights as his snarling opponent repeatedly stamps on his, and the audiences’, face. It’s an unusually contemptuous opening for a filmmaker as warm as Spielberg typically is, and oddly incongruous in a film that later suggests empathy is humanity’s greatest evolutionary trait.

Words: Charlie Jones | Angry Usher Reviews Imagery: Courtesy of Universal Pictures

As, say, David Lynch did with a sledgehammer smashing a television set in the opening to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), or Warwick Thorton did with black and white powders dropping into a bubbling cauldron at the beginning of Sweet Country (2017), it seems Spielberg is trying to make a statement with such a confrontational jerk of the curtain. Where Lynch was communicating a distinction between his film and Twin Peaks the television show, and Thornton a point about racial tensions in 1920s Australia, what statement Spielberg is trying to make is somewhat unclear: that feigned government ignorance of extraterrestrial life is a kayfabe of sorts? That in our world, as in wrestling, the line between reality and fiction is blurred? That human nature is intrinsically violent? Whatever the case, it’s striking.

Watching the wrestling match unfold is Josh O’Connor’s Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity expert on the run after stealing flash drives containing evidence of extraterrestrial activity on Earth from his employers, the Wardex Corporation, a shady government contractor headed by Colin Firth’s villainous Noah Scanlon. While Daniel evades pursuing Wardex agents, local news meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) begins speaking an unknown language live on air following an encounter with an inquisitive red cardinal. Guided remotely by Colman Domingo’s omniscient Hugo, who is something of a cross between The X-Files’ Deep Throat and Morpheus from The Matrix (the Wachowskis, 1999), Daniel and Margaret will attempt to unite and make public their knowledge of Wardex’s alien cover-up, as global superpowers ready themselves for World War Three.

To begin with, Disclosure Day flirts with ideas about journalistic ethics. Early on, for example, at a farmhouse, Daniel and his girlfriend Jade (Eve Hewson) debate the implications of disclosing to the world a truth as momentous as alien life. It quickly abandons this line of inquiry, however, and instead turns its attention to less well-defined ideas about religion, psychology, and their intersection. Despite Spielberg and writer David Koepp’s attempt to enliven these undercooked ideas with an extended on-the-run narrative structure, the film’s main problem arises from its distinct lack of Spielbergian awe, wonderment, and tension. This is perhaps a reflection of the film’s curiously empty soundscape, with composer John Williams’ score, which Spielberg has generously described as ‘restrained’, absent for long stretches of the runtime. As a result, the drama often falls flat, particularly when focused on O’Connor’s thinly sketched Daniel. His soft-spoken, vacant demeanour has none of the nervous energy necessary to heighten the tension of a given scene, something that’s compounded by the omission of any escalation related to the impending outbreak of WW3.

One scene of panicked civilians anxiously snatching provisions off a gas station shelf aside, the outbreak remains merely set decoration, akin to Hugo’s mysterious reconstruction of Margaret’s childhood home, only with less consequence. Add to all this an unfortunate insistence on cartoonish humour (during a mid-point standoff in an empty warehouse, with whistleblowers on one side and Wardex cronies on the other, positioned as if they’re Jets and Sharks about to rumble, one Wardex soldier splats against an invisible door like Wile E. Coyote sprinting into a rockface painted to look like a tunnel) and Disclosure Day begins to resemble the missteps in Spielberg’s filmography rather than its highpoints, more Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) than Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Intriguingly, come Disclosure Day’s climax, during which Daniel broadcasts to the world the contents of his stolen flash drives, it’s not the accumulated narrative conveniences on display that most offend but the film’s concluding political stance. For a filmmaker as consistently disapproving of US President Donald Trump as Spielberg is, he does share one thing in common with him: just as Trump and his administration appear to believe that their ongoing release of government files related to aliens and UFOs will distract the public from the wars in Iran and Ukraine, so too does Spielberg appear to believe that ‘full disclosure to the whole world’ will prevent global conflict by uniting our species. ‘Full disclosure’ notwithstanding, that this clearly isn’t the case in real-life means that Disclosure Day’s depictions of American and Russian soldiers glued to their phones on the frontlines fails to ring true. Ironically, Spielberg’s optimism whiffs of Trumpian bluster.

Further hindering any third act suspension of disbelief are the poorly rendered aliens observed in Daniel’s footage, all of them computer-generated rather than brought to life with practical, tactile effects. A news anchor who asks his colleagues whether the images they’re seeing are AI-generated doesn’t help matters; sadly, AI would probably have pumped out something more convincing than the doddery, wheelchair-bound Grey that Hugo’s whistleblowers unveil in the film’s closing moments. Disclosure Day’s one saving grace is Courtney Grace, a former news anchor turned actor, here playing the anchor to whom it falls to describe to the public the various images they’re seeing: of UFOs, crash sites, human-alien contact, and state-sanctioned torture of extraterrestrial beings. As she ponders what these revelations mean for humanity and its place in the universe, her voice breaks, and for a brief moment Disclosure Day finally feels Spielbergian. It’s a reminder that to arouse an audience’s empathy one need not stamp it into them until their faces are bloodied with understanding. All that’s needed is simple, authentic human emotion.