Review: DISCLOSURE DAY

 by Rob DiCristino

Hail to the king, baby.

Someday soon — hopefully not too soon — cinephiles around the world will gather to celebrate the life and work of perhaps our greatest filmmaker, Steven Spielberg. We’ll write thinkpieces and record podcasts. We’ll conduct interviews and hold retrospectives. We’ll wax rhapsodic about how E.T. helped us through our parents’ divorce. How Jurassic Park inspired our lifelong fascination with the sciences. We’ll get emotional while talking about how Saving Private Ryan repaired our relationship with our dad. How Jaws ruined our family vacations. Young Letterboxd’ers will recall how watching Lincoln in school gave them a better appreciation of American history than any textbook ever could, and a murderer’s row of Hollywood’s A-list directors will explain how Raiders of the Lost Ark imbued them with the courage to make movies of their own. Spielberg’s contribution to popular culture is immeasurable. His tenacity and craftsmanship are unmatched. To put it plainly: Steven Spielberg built the twenty-first century, and our debt to him can never, ever be repaid.

And, lest that elegiac opening mislead you, he’s not finished yet. His latest is Disclosure Day, another entry in an ongoing series of UFO-themed thrillers that began with 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As with that film — as well as his 2005 adaptation of War of the Worlds — Disclosure Day isn’t concerned as much with the aliens above us as it is with our neighbors here on earth, beginning with a young computer technician named Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor). Defecting from shadowy cybersecurity giant Wardex with a backpack full of mysterious alien artifacts, Daniel and his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), are en route to an undisclosed location where Hugo (Daniel’s former manager, played by the effervescent Colman Domingo) and other Wardex-iles prepare to blow the whistle on a vast conspiracy. What Wardex is hiding is unclear, but it evidently involves Kansas City TV meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), who finds herself suddenly possessed of odd talents: She can read minds, for example, and seems to speak conversational Korean.

Meanwhile, Wardex boss Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) and his team of blackhats pursue Daniel and Maragaret across the greater southeast, with Noah using a handheld alien device — a sibling of the one in Daniel’s backpack — to form psychic bonds with the fugitives so he can manipulate their actions. Jane’s the most susceptible, as it turns out, either because of her previous life as a Catholic nun or her nagging sense of unease with Daniel’s mission: Sure, people deserve to know the truth, but has he given enough thought to the effect these revelations will have on a world already inches away from mutually-assured destruction? And what about Margaret’s clairvoyance? Does it have something to do with her years of missing childhood memories? Or is it the first sign of Parkinson’s, the disease that killed her father? Margaret can’t be sure of anything, but — despite protests from her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell, well cast as an insipid doofus) — she believes that her gifts are the first step toward a monumental new chapter for the entire human race.

It’s that weight of purpose, that dedication to each individual’s responsibility for our collective integrity, that has always fueled Spielberg’s best blockbusters, and Disclosure Day is no exception. It’s a film about the bonds we share with each other, about the way our inherent interconnectivity has become muddled by decades of algo-driven social media isolation. While it certainly shares DNA with the rest of Steve’s alien oeuvre — which, remember, includes Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — it might actually be Minority Report that provokes the most comparisons, especially when Margaret uses her Precog-like influence to remind others of their lost loves and missed connections. It’s a shmaltzy device, sure, but it’s the kind of schmaltz that Spielberg — whose original story inspired the screenplay by longtime stalwart David Koepp — has never been hip or ironic enough to be embarrassed by. However outmoded it may seem in the age of Tik Tok and reality television, Steven Spielberg still cannot help but think of the human race as a family.

And if we are indeed a family, then Emily Blunt is most certainly Mother. Shifting between gears so extreme that you might actually forget she’s also affecting a saccharine-sweet American accent at the same time, Blunt delivers a bravura performance worthy of her early Hollywood work in Looper, The Devil Wears Prada, and Edge of Tomorrow (otherwise known as “The Days Before She Just Played the Wife”). Margaret is the literal Rosetta Stone of Disclosure Day, reading the thoughts and feelings of those around her at breakneck speed — Steve even gives her one of his patented Long Takes just to show off — and rearranging each of them into clues that unlock the film’s larger mystery. Koepp’s functional (if often clunky and flavorless) screenplay doesn’t always make the best use of her dexterity, but Blunt gives Margaret such a specific brand of empathetic curiosity that even the vaguest aspects of her gift feel lively and credible. O’Connor, Domingo, and Firth all give good face — crucial in a Spielberg joint — but Blunt is the prism that brings Disclosure Day into focus.

And even if the disquieting fuck-tastrophy of our modern world has soured you on Spielberg’s undeniably Boomerish approach to human kinship — You’ve probably already forgotten that the U.S. government recently disclosed evidence of actual UFOs — Disclosure Day still finds the old master at the top of his visual game. After years of watching flat, pre-rendered action sequences shot against the Volume or Stagecraft or Whatever the Fuck It’s Called Now, audiences should be dazzled by cameras that actually move through three-dimensional spaces, by whip-smart blocking that turns one of Janusz Kamiński’s frames into three or four new ones, and by the invigorating brass notes of an honest-to-god John Williams score. They should be moved by a story told with awe and wonder instead of smarm and cynicism (see last week’s Masters of the Universe). In short, Steven Spielberg may no longer be at the vanguard of our fractured culture, but that just means it’s up to us to pass on what Disclosure Day codifies as his simple, essential message: You are not alone.

Disclosure Day hits U.S. theaters on Friday, June 12th.