Disclosure Day

 It’s time for the other D-Day.

That’s right, it’s time to disclose what I thought about Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated sci-fi movie. What’s going to stop me from revealing the truth? It’s not like I’m going to step on any government conspiracy. Let’s go and  …

Did I walk into Street Fighter?

Those were my actual thoughts. Why so? Well, it’s because we’re opening with a cage match, where Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is in the audience. Daniel, a cybersecurity guy, has stolen top-secret files from the shadowy Wardex Corporation, and he’s here to exchange them for his nabbed girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson). They instead flee with the files, with Wardex CEO Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) and his goons in pursuit.

It turns out that Daniel has evidence of alien life on Earth, dating back to the Roswell crash of 1947. He plans to make it all public, which would hopefully avert an increasingly likely World War III. When Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City weatherwoman and emergent psychic, suddenly speaks in alien tongues on the air, he's the only one who can understand it. They eventually find each other, and together with Wardex defector Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), they set out to make Disclosure Day a reality.

David Koepp’s screenplay, working from Spielberg’s own screenstory, slowly unfolds Daniel’s mission like it were a mystery. Granted, we already know what it is, considering that’s the premise, but there’s a nice level of intrigue as we wait for him to reveal it. A close comparison is Jurassic Park, which Koepp also wrote, and which slowly built up the dinosaur park as a reveal. What I’m trying to say is that the pacing, particularly in the first act, is pretty good. It’s nearly a half-hour longer than Jurassic Park, though, and you’ll gradually start to feel it.

The screenplay also indulges in some flying leaps in logic. Take Hugo’s part in the story, for example, as he spends most of his plot replicating Margaret’s childhood home as a film set. It’s part of an elaborate plan to help jog her childhood memories, but he doesn’t know she’s the one until her viral newscast. Keep in mind the plot spans about two days, and the set building probably would’ve started much earlier. There is a possible answer, who shows up at the literal last minute, so it’s not much help. A few re-watches, though, might help one understand it all.

Between the leads, I found Margaret to be the more compelling one. Sure, Daniel is an upstanding guy and a bit of an optimist (considering the premise), but Margaret’s uneasy discovery of her powers makes her relatable. Blunt gets a really well-acted scene when she panics in a train car filled with pianos. Yes, really, and this is after Scanlon’s top henchman Boyd (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), tried to ram them into that train. It's quite remarkable to watch her assert herself, as an anchorwoman and as a person, during the film. On the subject of anchoring, real life reporter-turned-actress Courtney Grace has the film’s best performance as an NBC Anchor who tries to hold it together when she reports on the Disclosure.

Throughout the film, Scanlon and Daniel have access to alien devices that seemingly let them do whatever the plot needs them to do. Scanlon uses it to talk to Jane via astral projection and drive her to try to kill Daniel. It’s a neat prop, even if we have to infer how they work, while the cast just knows right away. It gets contrived when Margaret figures out the backup generator function in the finale. Though, it does lead to some great comedy when Margaret cloaks the set, just as Wardex breaks in, and the agents stumble around it. 

Scanlon, meanwhile, is an interesting enough villain. He's determined to maintain the big secret, not just for the government, but to assuage his own fears. Basically, "What if Disclosure makes it all worse?" Hugo is basically the counterpoint, which he argues with Scanlon in their one scene together. We see him overwhelmed at one point during his interrogating Jane. When his last-ditch efforts to sabotage the broadcast fail, he just sits down as if to say, "what's the point?" It’s another great performance from Firth, and I do have a quibble about his character that I’ll have to bring up in the next paragraph.

Margaret, as part of her powerset, can appear to anyone as someone special. In Scanlon's case, it's his late wife Jocelyn (Lucy Taylor), whom the film barely explores. That's my quibble about Scanlon, but Margaret's seamless psychic shapeshifting represents the best of Sarah Broshar's (succeeding the now retired Michael Kahn) editing skills. She further shines during the action scenes, as well as the Disclosure Day broadcast. The sound designers, visual effects team, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, and John Williams (who needs little elaboration), deliver their usual greatness. I think I said enough.

Disclosure Day, for whatever flaws it has, is an earnest film. Improbable? Yes. Abruptly ends? Yes. But the climax is assuredly optimistic. You can't accuse it of faltering, or faking, its beliefs. Overall, it's an interesting companion piece - or a spiritual sequel - to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I'd rather let it disclose a few more secrets to you personally. It's worth the trip.