Disclosure Day Came 20 Years Too Late

Review — 3 out of 5 stars

Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer, The Devil Wears Prada) and Josh O’Connor (Wake Up Dead Man, Challengers) lead this sci-fi adventure as two strangers who mysteriously find themselves at the center of an alien coverup—O’Connor playing a government whistleblower and Blunt a TV weatherwoman who herself has direct contact with alien intelligence.

There are several exciting sequences throughout and director Steven Spielberg (E.T., Minority Report) deploys all his classic tricks to squeeze as much energy as possible from a script with no sense of urgency. Unfortunately I felt some of the story came off as dated and some of the characters so thin it made it harder to believe the larger-than-life mystery the film is trying to unfold.

Despite those feelings, Emily Blunt delivers a captivating performance that keeps the movie (mostly) on track by sheer force of will. By the end I did find myself pondering the big questions Disclosure Day asks, even though the film itself never digs beneath the surface.

Analysis — contains spoilers

What if… there were aliens? And the government knew??

What’s that? The White House said so last month? Well, nevertheless…

I won’t hold the creative team behind Disclosure Day accountable for our government’s tendency for fabulism, but there’s a blindness to current events that makes this movie hard to believe. We know that aliens have probably existed somewhere, and we know that they probably don’t look like little gray men. Hollywood absorbed these conclusions long before this film. Disclosure Day apparently takes place in a world where the UFO craze of the 20th century never happened.

For me this movie felt lost in time—not just how the aliens look, but story elements too. World War 3 with Russia? The Pentagon moved on from that storyline years ago. And personally, I’ve never seen a news team as horny as the anchors at Margaret Fairchild’s (Emily Blunt) TV station. No wonder she’s looking for new jobs! Then later, in the newsroom, one character references political instability as a result of “the Nixon thing.” Man we’re way past Nixon, just ask the vice president.

Worst of all is the antagonist Scanlon (Colin Firth) who’s convinced that the public can’t handle the truth but never explains why. If only we knew what in God’s name he was planning for all those magic silver tubes. Surveillance technology perhaps? That’s just Palantir with extra steps, except I’m actually afraid of Peter Thiel.

Steven Spielberg gets back to his roots with this film and he delivers his trademark camera flair and sense of wonder, but the action falls flat because the message is too weak. I couldn’t help but compare this movie to Minority Report because they hit many of the same beats. The difference is Minority Report draws a firm conclusion from its themes and its lead was better suited for its action sequences.

I could easily look past these minor grievances if we got even a hint of why this supremely intelligent alien species endured such hardship to have their message heard by humans. I found the disclosure day sequence genuinely moving, driven by the show-stealing performance from Courtney Grace as an on-air news anchor, but we never learn what motivated those aliens to involve themselves on Earth in the first place. Do they want to live on Earth? Are they being held against their will? Disclosure Day is content to let us fill in the blanks ourselves, but its ending is too ambiguous for any idea to stick.