‘Disclosure Day’ Review: Spielberg Back in Blockbuster Mode, In Search of the Truth (and an Ending)

Three weeks to the day before Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day opened in theaters, the U.S. Government released a bunch of previously classified footage of unidentified aerial phenomena. The world’s reaction: A collective shrug. The most fantastical part of Spielberg’s new conspiracy thriller might not be its suggestion that UFOs and aliens exist, but rather the notion that proof that UFOs and aliens exist might be so dangerous to the social order that a government contractor would stop at nothing to prevent its release.

In classic Spielberg fashion, Disclosure Day mashes up thrilling chases and extended suspense sequences, all centered around some very likable characters (and at least one terrifying one) connected to that combustible, extraterrestrial truth. As our relatively ordinary heroes get caught up in this massive cover-up, Spielberg generates an enormous air of mystery — at least until a predictable and unsatisfying third act that’s as deflating as an unknotted helium balloon.

READ MORE: The Best Movies Produced By Steven Spielberg

Until that point, Disclosure Day is a compelling blockbuster of the sort we rarely see anymore, except when Spielberg himself makes them. At 79 years old, he stands as one of the last practitioners of the form he helped pioneer with Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Big adventure movies where the large-scale special effects work in service of the characters and the story, rather than the other way around.

The two people at the center of his new film are Josh O’Connor’s Daniel and Emily Blunt’s Margaret. Daniel’s a cybersecurity expert with stolen information — and a mysterious “device” — from the Wardex Corporation, which is led by the ominous Noah Scanlon (a truly scary Colin Firth).

Margaret’s a Kansas City meteorologist who gets on TV one morning and inexplicably finds herself delivering the local forecast in an unintelligible series of clicks and pops. When the video of Margaret speaking in tongues goes viral online, Scanlon determines to track her down, sensing she holds a connection to the same secret he’s struggling to protect, and Daniel’s fighting to release to the public.

In Disclosure Day’s opening moments, Daniel attempts to exchange the all-important “device” for a woman named Jane (Eve Hewson); Scanlon and his men are scared enough of this doohickey that Daniel manages to bluff his way out of a standoff and make a hasty escape. Daniel and Jane turn out to be a couple, albeit one who’ve kept many secrets from each other. When she demands an explanation for the ongoing chaos around them, he tells her “I stole the data they paid me to protect.”

The data, as you can surely guess, involves proof of alien life, along with that aforementioned device and its amazing capabilities. Without spoiling too much, this unearthly weapon inspires many of Disclosure Day’s most memorable scenes. What this thing can do, the careful ways it must be handled, how it allows Scanlon to pursue his agenda of protecting Wardex’s secrets — it’s just a fabulous movie gadget, dreamed up by Spielberg (who wrote Disclosure Day’s story) and David Koepp (who wrote the script). Everything about the device is wonderful. Give me ten sequels about people fighting over the device.

The larger mythology around the device, though, feels a little more nebulous. Daniel and Margaret’s only trustworthy ally in their race to stay away from Scanlon is a Wardex whistleblower named Hugo (Colman Domingo) who calls them both on burner phones with vague warnings and intimations of supernatural knowledge they (and the audience) can barely understand.

But the film does not live up to all of his promises of shocking revelations, and in general, the movie is a long (though admittedly very exciting) build-up to an underwhelming payoff. Disclosure Day also never quite justifies the obvious question that everyone in the audience will ask (and Daniel himself raises in an early scene): If the world needs to know these secrets, why do Daniel and Hugo hold on to them for so long, risking the chance that Scanlon catches them and destroys the data for good, when they could just release them on the internet?

Obviously one of the answers to that question is “If they did, there wouldn’t be much of a movie.” And to be clear: The first two thirds of Disclosure Day are so fun and spooky and clever, they more than justify the somewhat disappointing finale.

The ending works much better as a statement than as drama. While I do appreciate Spielberg reaching to say something grand and emphatic and even hopeful with a summer blockbuster about alien conspiracies, Disclosure Day’s message would hit a lot harder if it wasn’t delivered in such anticlimactic fashion.

Additional Thoughts:

-There are generally few things I find more exhausting than online scolds who complain that modern trailers spoil too much of movies. But the recent “Final Trailer” for Disclosure Day really does reveal the entire plot of the film. If you haven’t seen that trailer yet and you already know you want to see Disclosure Day, I would do my best to avoid it. I kind of wish I hadn’t watched it — something I almost never say about trailers.

-The Fabelmans continues to reframe the way I look at almost every other Spielberg movie. Disclosure Day, for example, includes a major action set piece involving a speeding train — the same image that so transfixed Sammy Fabelman in The Greatest Show on Earth that it sparked his lifelong fascination with cinema. (The train’s cargo? Grand pianos like the one Sammy’s mother plays in several key scenes.)

-Obviously, this is not the place to discuss what transpires in Disclosure Day’s final scenes. But here is something to consider after you see the film: What exactly do the movie’s final images want to say about technology and monoculture?

RATING: 7/10

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