Steven Spielberg is sometimes unfairly tagged as the ultimate Boomer, repeatedly harkening back to the entertainment that spellbound him in his youth. And there was a time, far earlier in his career, when that label stuck better—when Indiana Jones, friendly aliens, mean dinosaurs, and Peter Pan himself dominated the director’s filmography. But throughout the 21st century, Spielberg has been quite loudly devoted to commenting on the times he’s living through, whether by plumbing the past (with the pointed messaging of The Post and Bridge of Spies) or the future (the frightening surveillance state of Minority Report or the frictionless dystopia of Ready Player One). Now, with Disclosure Day, his newest movie, he’s charging right at the current moment.
Written by David Koepp (though the story is credited to Spielberg), Disclosure Day is Spielberg’s first film set in the ostensible present since 2005’s War of the Worlds, and it feels just as informed by recent real-life happenings as that one did. War of the Worlds was an obvious and devastating response to the carnage of 9/11, updating the classic novel to a modern-day depiction of a society coming undone in the face of an apocalyptic alien invasion. Disclosure Day also involves aliens but uses them conspiratorially, at the edges of the tale. The plot is more concerned with people, and specifically a whistleblower named Daniel Kellner (played by Josh O’Connor), who’s on the run after stealing evidence that the government has concealed extraterrestrial visits to Earth.
At the same time, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a meteorologist (and aspiring lead anchor) for a Kansas City local-news station, finds she has developed peculiar mental abilities—including reading people’s minds. After she starts babbling in a bizarre language on air, she captures the attention of the group that’s hunting Daniel: Wardex, a shadowy Department of Defense contractor tasked with protecting the classified information Daniel has taken. Margaret, like Daniel, ends up on the lam, and Spielberg whisks the audience along for these two merry chases; a network of informants guides them along the way, working together in the hopes of revealing the truth to the global public. Yet following them closely behind is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), Wardex’s nervy CEO, who’s intent on burying the facts out of fear that humanity can’t handle this mind-expanding knowledge. Spielberg, ever the optimist, believes that we can.
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For all of his inherent hopefulness as a storyteller, however, Spielberg also readily casts a wary eye at the powers that be. In Munich, the retelling of Mossad’s covert retaliations after the 1972 Munich massacre, he articulated his fear of cycles of state violence ending in nothing but more violence. His biographical portrait of Abraham Lincoln was triumphant but measured, depicting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment as laden with political chicanery and bullying; the people in charge often abused their authority, even if it was for the right reasons. The Post, which the director assembled quickly after the election of Donald Trump, sought to remind viewers of the value of a free and open press.
Disclosure Day isn’t as pointed a work about the president, but it is clearly burdened by Spielberg’s anxieties about the diffuse, disconnected character of American life today. It unbalances the viewer by segmenting its characters, keeping Margaret and Daniel separated for much of the runtime as they race to figure out what’s going on. Their advocate and fellow leaker, Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), is able to speak with them only over the phone, making Margaret and Daniel destroy their devices after every call. The events take place amid a new geopolitical crisis involving Russia and North Korea; background news reports suggest that a nuclear exchange could be in the offing. Yet we never get the full picture of what is unfolding, just a sense of unease that seems to pervade everyday life.
The film’s secrets dribble out slowly but are the usual grab bag of obsessive thinking about aliens on Earth that have long appeared in pop culture: UFO footage that seems to defy physics, a cover-up at Area 51, government pilfering of curious futuristic technology, people disappeared in the name of preventing a panic. Koepp’s script is not really interested in the how and the why, because the plot is moving too quickly to lay out every detail. Instead the worry is what the world might make of such suppression—and whether there’s even room in people’s brains these days to collectively consider, and take at face value, a shocking revelation of this magnitude.
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Though O’Connor delivers a similar type of smooth, tender leading man as the one he showed off in Wake Up Dead Man last year, Blunt’s performance is the most captivating. She plays Margaret as constantly veering toward a nervous breakdown; she remains committed to her ambiguous mission, however, thanks to her journalistic instincts. She’s helped by the fact that she has tapped into a fantastical strain of super-empathy. She finds it to be burdensome, though; Blunt renders her gift as the source of a never-ending migraine. It also happens to be the kind of strength that Spielberg seems to wish society had more of.
Disclosure Day is an action film of sorts—it moves along at a breakneck pace, with some great driving and a tremendous set piece involving a freight train. But in the same vein as other heady Spielberg blockbusters, such as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and E.T., the movie focuses on relatively ordinary people confronted with extraordinary circumstances. They use their hearts and heads, rather than firepower and brawn, to deal with their problems. Disclosure Day’s epic conclusion comes across as if Spielberg is sending the audience a message, begging them to use their hearts and heads too. The moment plays into every complaint that’s ever been lodged about this raging sentimentality; I loved every second.
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