Disclosure Day review – distinctly lacking in patented Spielberg magic

Between Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Steven Spielberg’s visions of how humanity might interact with interstellar visitors have become so beloved it’s fair to say that no artist has impacted the cultural depiction of alien life forms more. His enduring fascination with the subject matter is shared by writer David Koepp, who has screenplay credits on four of Spielberg’s films. Disclosure Day marks their fifth collaboration; their third that focuses on aliens. Given this impressive track record, it’s little wonder that anticipation for the film has been so high, with plot details shrouded in mystery and Universal Pictures even declining an open invitation to première in Cannes from Thierry Frémaux – instead choosing to focus all their efforts on a splashy opening. 

Despite claims it’s all about maintaining audience excitement and preventing spoilers, one has to wonder if the studio were worried. Despite the global love for Spielberg, West Side Story was a box office bomb and The Fabelmans didn’t fair much better (traditional wisdom dictates a film must earn three times its production budget to turn a profit). Of course, box office returns often aren’t indicative of quality; both films were critically acclaimed and vastly better than the $600-million-grossing Ready Player One, but the sad fact is we live in a world where even a legend in Hollywood is beholden to financial scrutiny. There’s no such thing as a blank cheque anymore – audiences are fickle, cinema tickets are expensive, streaming services exist, yadda yadda yadda. 

But a new Steven Spielberg film – a new Steven Spielberg film about aliens no less! – should be an event, especially given the stacked cast comprising Josh O’Connor, Emily Blunt, Colin Firth and Colman Domingo. Indeed Disclosure Day kicks off with a certain level of tasty intrigue, as cybersecurity expert turned whistleblower Daniel Kellner (O’Connor) faces off against his boss from shady security NGO Wardex, Noah Scanlan (Firth), who’s taken his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) hostage in order to bargain for the data that Kellner liberated. Said data not only confirms the existence of alien lifeforms, but the systematic exploitation and concealment of them by the US government for the last 70-odd years. Kellner, along with his colleague Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) and a band of other Wardex defectors, have decided it’s time the world knows the truth.

The world, as it happens, is also on the brink of World War Three, with exposition-heavy news reports letting us know that the US and Russia are about five minutes away from nuking each other, Europe’s moving troops to the Schengen area, and North Korea’s leader (referred to only as ​“Kim” presumably in order to avoid another The Interview debacle) is also trying to get in on the action. Hugo et al seem to believe that revealing irrefutable proof of alien lifeforms to the world will give humanity something else to focus on, though Noah and Jane are sceptical that humanity has the compassion to treat the news as a positive. 

Meanwhile, Kansas City weather reporter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is hoping to make the jump to the news desk, but a strange encounter with a cardinal bird in her kitchen portends an even weirder day at work where she beings vocalising odd clicking noises during the live weather segment. The incident puts her straight on a collision course with Kellner and Scanlan as opposing forces work to liberate and conceal the truth before the world ends.

So far, so Spielberg – he sets the stage for an ambitious, epic, action-heavy story about a group of do-gooders facing off against a sinister corporation. But Koepp’s screenplay simply isn’t up to the task; tonally uneven with a thinly-sketched religious subplot, the stilted dialogue gives the impression of a writer who’s never heard humans have a conversation before, much less written countless films to that effect. Spielberg’s boyish earnestness clashes with a mostly humourless script, resulting in a distracting goofiness (on more than one occasion characters evade capture by hiding behind a large physical obstacle like it’s an episode of Scooby-Doo) that undercuts the narrative tension. 

Wilful withholding of information results only in confusion and plot holes so big they have their own field of orbit; even a cast as dramatically able as this one can’t lift the leaden script, with Firth reduced to a grimacing caricature of a villain and Blunt flitting around like a bee trapped inside a hot living room. O’Connor, always so magnetic on screen, suffers from a one-note character he struggles to imbue with life – his romantic plot with Hewson’s joyless former nun only serves to add a frustrating, unconvincing hurdle. 

Disclosure Day isn’t without fleeting moments of wonder – the few interactions between humans and aliens chief among them – but it’s impossible to extract this film from the wider canon of Spielberg, upon which so much has been built. Spielberg revealed that his interest in alien life was reignited by a 2017 New York Times article about the Pentagon’s mysterious ​‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’, and this ultimately led him to the idea that Koepp expanded into Disclosure Day. Yet there’s little of that DNA in the finished product; the tantalising question of whether humanity has the capacity to treat an alien species as anything other than a threat remains just out of reach as the film focuses instead on the fairly uninteresting tug-of-war to keep the secret in the first place.

A bad script could be forgiven if Disclosure Day was a triumph on a craft level, but even this falls short with frequent Spielberg collaborators as lacklustre as Koepp. Janusz Kamiński returns for his twenty-first Spielberg picture – so many of their collaborations presented distinct visual identities which elegantly captured a sense of time, place and emotion, winning Kamiński two Academy Awards for Cinematography in the process. Disclosure Day​’s prevailing mood is ​‘vague gloom‘ with a distinct lack of memorable shots, while John Williams’ score (described as ​“subtle” by Spielberg) reflects the film’s uninspired execution. Even the VFX work is shoddy, with Polar Express-level CGI animals taking the audience out of what are supposed to be the film’s core emotional moments.

None of this gives me any joy to report. Few were as excited about the prospect of a new Spielberg alien film as I was, and what hurts the most is the distinct feeling that this could have been a true conclusion to a career-long narrative. Close Encounters, E.T and War of the Worlds all manage to articulate something about the human condition and how we relate not only to each other but to the world around us; Disclosure Day gestures vaguely at similar territory, but never lands on solid ground. It might be a case of Spielberg hampered by his own back catalogue, but it’s also hard to not see the film as curiously out-of-touch with the present despite the contemporary setting. 

The handful of truly great alien films we’ve witnessed in the last 15 years, notably Arrival, Nope (also Universal!), Under the Skin and Super 8 (which Spielberg produced), only serve to underline how unfortunate this feels. All these films are indebted to Spielberg’s groundwork at some level might as well not exist for all the interest Disclosure Day has in expanding or building upon them. This is a film not in dialogue with the cultural reality or cultural potential of aliens, refusing to mesh with the contemporary world on a political or cultural level, but also clearly not meant as a retro throwback. Emerging blinking into the foyer after Disclosure Day, one isn’t confronted with a sense of wonder or curiosity, but instead of abject confusion at the incoherence of Koepp’s script and lack of technical ambition on Spielberg’s end. Perhaps this is the film’s real truth: never underestimate mankind’s capacity for disappointment.