ET Grown Up
Your enjoyment of STeven Spielberg’s latest will rely entirely on where you fall on his faith in humanity scale.
Disclosure Day
Director: Steven Spielberg • Writer: David Koepp
Starring: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo, Wyatt Russell, Eve Hewson
USA • 2hrs 25mins
Opens Hong Kong June 10 • IIA
Grade: B-
For all his technical prowess, it is his pure storytelling ability and commitment to a distinct voice, however sentimental, that has made Steven Spielberg one of the GOAT filmmakers. You don’t have to like him but you have to respect his skill; beyond a doubt Duel, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Art and Jurassic Park cast long shadows for good reason. Things are sketchier when he tackles “real” topics (The Color Purple, Amistad, and yes, Schindler’s List) but his films are nonetheless perfectly constructed. There’s a reason he’s a massive influence on filmmakers now. But if we’re talking about late-period Spielberg, starting around The Adventures of Tintin, it feels as if he’s been drifting in and out of… what?… engagement? Enthusiasm? Not sure what it is but Tintin, and Lincoln, and The Post, and (gag) Ready Player One have all felt like Stevie thought he wanted to tell Story X and lost interest halfway through. That’s not to say he half-assed it. Never. But only the criminally underseen West Side Story and The Fabelmans truly met his own extremely high bar. Let’s admit it: the former was a storytelling and genre experiment for him (a musical) and the latter was semi-autobiographical and so innately “expert”. Scan Spielberg’s entire oeuvre and it becomes clear the man performs best when faced with a challenge.
So sitting down to Disclosure Day is a fraught experience. Will we be in The Post territory or on the West Side? Perhaps more appropriately Disclosure Day lands firmly in E.T the Extra-Terrestrial-land rather than near Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s less about the reveal of alien life and the governmental conspiracies to keep that knowledge hidden and more about us, our beliefs and our better angels – more Arrival than Communion. And that’s why the film often lands with a thud.
Could Freddy do this?
Spielberg’s innate childlike optimism and lack of cynicism – while refreshing at a time it’s desperately needed – too often can’t rise above the human nature it’s trying to explore. Spielberg doesn’t need to change; he just needs to acknowledge the reality of cynicism around him, and that many of us are just assholes, even in an unreal story.
Which starts with a guy in the audience at a live wrestling match, looking super-nervous. He’s approached by two men-in-black types who take his knapsack and march him outside. The dude was the cybersecurity boss at shady AF data (?) corporation Wardex and wannabe whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor, Challengers), whose knapsack contains chip upon chip of sensitive documents about alien contact. Rich, powerful Wardex boss Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, doing excellent villain) wants it back. Elsewhere, Kansas City TV weatherperson Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), who’d much rather be a “real” journalist than doing the hailstorm shimmy on local news, is showing signs of restlessness with her musician beauhunk Jackson (Wyatt Russell, underused), who’s struggling to figure out what her deal is – especially when she starts yammering in Russian out of nowhere. She gets to work and goes live with the forecast and promptly starts making jibberish clicking (the ones we’ve collectively agreed are alien language) noises before passing out. For… reasons, Daniel and Margaret find themselves on the run from Wardex together, running towards the shelter of Daniel’s handler and ex-Wardex exec Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) and a central role in the world-shaking disclosure that Star Trek is real.
Disclosure Day is hands down one of Spielberg’s weirdest and most inconsistent films, swerving all over the place from conspiracy thriller, to abduction drama, to (mostly) lugubrious meditation on faith – in science, in religion, in the self, in humanity. Credit to him for the big swing (who else has that kind of movie mojo?), and admittedly when the film’s cooking it’s cooking. The tone bounces wildly from goofy to reverent and all stops in between, with some welcome respect for local news, creatively terrifying alien communication technology, great action set pieces (invisible fire engines, FTW) and a solid performance from Blunt as neo-Jesus. Yeah, you read that right. The friction between belief in God and the knowledge that we’re not alone in the universe is a core theme that gets spectacularly short shrift, mulled over in one short scene with failed nun Jane (Eve Hewson), Daniel’s girlfriend of roughly two weeks. And aside from some of the most viscous religious imagery this side of Mel Gibson, Jurassic World Rebirth writer David Koepp’s script is one of his laziest (a far cry from Black Bag), relying heavily on smart people being stupid (watch where you’re fucking driving!) and somehow venerating that bullshit “I have to save my [fill in the blank]” trope even when the gravity of the situation says otherwise. Case in point: Daniel acting a fool and running off to save Jane at one point. No. Sorry. Leave her ass behind.
Which, of course, is the film’s simmering central tension. I guess. Spielberg and Koepp lean hard into the inherent good in humanity for narrative momentum, but it would have felt more convincing were there more push-back than from just Scanlon, the avatar of all things bad. The imminent eruption of WWIII is a major undercurrent (at least before the better angels arrive) flowing beneath the main action, but from a story perspective it’s become hard to separate art from real life. Gone are the days, probably for good, when the world sat up and paid attention when Washington spoke, and that takes considerable wind out of the film’s sails, already deflated by undercooked motivations and half-baked ideas. Disclosure Day isn’t without its provocations, and this time around Spielberg feels invested, but in the end his sentimentality still wins the, erm, day and flirts with head-in-the-sand optimism. Or maybe it’s faith? If you vibe with Spielberg’s brand of hopefulness then the fat running time, regular shooter Janusz Kamiński’s overuse of lens flares and a raft of peripheral characters whose excision could have saved us 25 minutes won’t bother you one bit. But either way it makes Disclosure Day more ET Came Back than Close Encounters for Everyone.