Disclosure Day

Disclosure Day goes off the rails surprisingly early, with a trite and artificial ransom negotiation: Two characters we don’t know yet are yelling at each other in a parking lot; in a nutshell, the bad guy demands “Give me the Macguffin!” while the hero counters, “No, give me the girl!” The sequence is so utterly clunky that it plays like a movie-within-a-movie scene from a film about a hammy actor, a hack screenwriter, or an untalented director.

But Disclosure Day has none of these — this embarrassing moment features Colin Firth and Josh O’Connor performing dialogue by David Koepp under the guidance of Steven Spielberg. Which only proves that even the GOATs can whiff it sometimes.

That sensation of déjà vu with diminishing returns permeates the whole of Disclosure Day, which feels like a tour of tropes that Spielberg has tackled with greater skill and sensitivity earlier in his illustrious career. Over the course of a lumbering 145 minutes, the director revisits authorities-eluding car chases (The Sugarland Express), alien encounters (E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), paranoid thrills (Minority Report), and even earth-shattering exposé journalism (The Post). This time around, however, he’s excavating those ideas in ways that fail to engage emotionally and that misunderstand the culture’s current relationship with the news media. (Anyone who thinks video evidence would be immediately incontrovertible and convincing to a global audience has clearly never gone on Reddit.)

Spielberg (who also gets story credit) and Koepp plunge us into a world on the brink, with North and South Korean forces and their allies preparing for conflict. But mathematician Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) has other problems; he’s on the run from his former boss Noah (Colin Firth),who runs a shadowy corporation that’s been in cahoots with the U.S. government to keep secret the existence of aliens. Now, however, Daniel and several of his fellow employees, including Hugo (Colman Domingo), have gone rogue with plans to tell the world the truth.

Meanwhile, TV meteorologist Margaret (Emily Blunt) finds herself suddenly able to speak multiple languages and to read the thoughts of others, providing them with the advice they need to overcome their problems. She tries to ignore these odd new abilities, but when she speaks in an alien tongue during a live news segment, she becomes a target for Noah, even as she realizes that she must connect with Daniel for reasons she doesn’t quite understand.

Koepp is a mainstream genre master — last year’s Black Bag was one of the sexiest, sharpest spy sagas in ages — but his work here doesn’t reflect his usual skill. To tackle the idea of how the existence of aliens would either affirm or undercut one’s belief in God, for instance, Koepp gives us a former nun (played by Eve Hewson) who talks about this very subject in two scenes. The question is raised, the question is resolved, and that’s it. It’s the sort of A-is-A prose one might expect in a God’s Not Dead movie, but a writer of this caliber usually weaves such a potentially deep concept into his work with more delicacy.

But that’s hardly the script’s only problem; Disclosure Day takes a ridiculously long time to get Margaret and Daniel in the same place, and after all that buildup, the payoff never satisfies. Despite the contributions of Spielberg’s usual top-flight crew of artists — cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and composer John Williams, among others — the film never really takes off, even if it does offer some blockbuster moments (particularly a nail-biter involving a car and a train) along the way.

Spielberg’s West Side Story demonstrated that the old master still has exciting work in him when he chooses to tackle a genre that’s new to him. But like Ready Player One and The Fabelmans before it, Disclosure Day reveals an artist spinning his wheels when he digs back into his own past triumphs.

Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenwriter: David Koepp; story by Steven Spielberg
Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo
Executive producers: Adam Somner, Chris Brigham
Producers: Kristie Macosko Krieger, Steven Spielberg
Director of photography: Janusz Kaminski
Production design: Adam Stockhausen
Editing: Sarah Broshar
Music: John Williams
Sound design: Gary Rydstrom, re-recording mixer/sound designer/supervising sound editor
Production companies: Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment
In English
145 minutes