Preamble

As the great Randy Quaid said in Independence Day, “Hello boys, I’m back!” It’s good to come back to a film that has caused a lot of debate. I’ve come to Disclosure Day late, but nevertheless, been intrigued by Steven Spielberg’s return to science fiction cinema in over twenty years. Have you seen Disclosure Day? Let me know in the comments below.

Brief Consideration

Even as I sit here and type this, I’m still not entirely sure about Disclosure Day. Steven Spielberg’s latest (who also has a story credit) depicts the race against time to expose classified videos of aliens to the world at large. The whistleblower, Dr Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), battles his former employer, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), whose company, Wardex, is hell-bent on suppressing the top-secret information. Meanwhile, a local weather girl, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), goes viral for speaking an alien language while on air, but soon discovers the conspiracy may hold personal implications for her past.

Much like Spielberg’s previous alien efforts, Disclosure Day is a Rorschach test for humanity. The existence of said creatures says more about us and our concerns than it does about them. In this instance, Day attempts to debate how the knowledge of life out there will affect humanity, our relationship with God and how we deal with awe and wonder. All these debates feel meaningfully handled, with often a good amount of balance from both sides as opposed to trite one-sided nonsense.

However, Day’s problems come with their more emotional aspects. Whilst the set-up for these emotional arcs is commendable, they feel really muddled in their execution. Take Margaret, whose aim is to be taken seriously as a journalist who delivers hard-hitting and serious news. I don’t see how her ultimate recollection of the aliens in her childhood reinforces that arc or story. If anything, her abilities that unlock empathy and knowledge of people feel more like an ironic spin on being a news anchor that I wish the film leaned more into.

This aspect is compounded by a nebulous sense of the world. There’s lip service given to the world being on the brink, but this feels superficially sketched out, including murmurs of World War III. This takes the tension out of the closing events as emotions such as anger and fear are replaced with passivity.

In his direction, Spielberg channels M Night Shyamalan insofar as using interesting camera angles, framing and lenses to depict the aliens with a sense of uncanny and emotional weight. And Emily Blunt gives an oddly Brechtian-style performance that’s able to paint the picture of a person who is frantic and confused about the nature of their mind.