It’s been nearly 49 years since Steven Spielberg wrote and directed “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” his magnum opus about a conspiracy to hide the truth about UFOs, where believing in extra-terrestrials becomes a form of religious faith. His new sci-fi thriller “Disclosure Day” tackles a lot of the same themes but it’s been nearly half a century, so Spielberg updated his approach. It’s just strange that he updated it for the 1990s and stopped there. “Disclosure Day” would have been a great thriller in the heyday of “The X-Files,” but in the 2020s, it’s out of place and out of touch.
It’s fun to watch, though. Spielberg hasn’t made an action movie since “Ready Player One,” and he hasn’t made a good one since “The Adventures of Tintin,” but he hasn’t lost the knack. “Disclosure Day” is a bombastic chase film that drops you in the middle of the action and never lets up for more than a few minutes, at least until the finale. It’s so bombastic and enjoyable that it’s easy to forgive that the story doesn’t work. I won’t forget that the story doesn’t work, but it has my forgiveness.
“Disclosure Day” hits the ground running. Josh O’Connor plays Daniel Kellner, a math genius-turned-whistle blower, whose girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) comes pre-kidnapped by the evil Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). To get her back, he’ll have to return all the information he stole, but fortunately Kellner also stole a fiendish thingy, and Scanlon is afraid of the fiendish thingy, so Kellner and Jane go on the run.
It’s abundantly clear at the outset, and explained not long after, that Daniel stole evidence that extraterrestrials are real and that Noah’s company, Wardex, has been keeping their existence secret. Because if people knew aliens were real it would, everybody believes, change everything: Jane believes it would be the end of religion as we know it; Scanlon believes governments will completely destabilize; Kellner believes people deserve to know the truth, and that they’ll all believe him.
The fundamental problem is, in the year 2026, all those beliefs are naive. The fantasy that everyone in the world will accept a news report and change their fundamental values to match new facts, instead of sticking their fingers in their ears or shrugging and going about their business, is a pleasant one… we’ve just left that fantasy behind. The formerly reliable plot point that all the hero needs to do is reveal the truth and everything will get sorted out hasn’t held water in decades.
Still, it’s thrilling to watch Kellner and Jane run, especially since Scanlon has his own fiendish thingy and uses it to psychically manipulate Eve from a distance. Kellner can’t trust anybody, more than usual for a paranoid thriller, and these sci-fi spins on the old man-on-the-run recipe really spice up the sauce. O’Connor is a particularly believable protagonist — out of his element but determined, sincere yet jaded — and brings a much-needed everyman quality to a very broad story.
But that’s Movie A.
Meanwhile, in Movie B, Emily Blunt plays Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City TV meteorologist who meets a plucky cardinal — the bird, not a baseball player or religious muckety-muck — and suddenly speaks fluent Russian. And reads people’s minds. She develops an psychic connection with anyone she looks at, learning their language immediately, empathizing with their personal trauma and dishing out the perfect advice for every occasion. None of this explains why she suddenly spoke Russian, since she was looking at her boyfriend and he doesn’t speak it, but don’t let logic ruin your fun. The movie sure didn’t.
Margaret goes viral when she speaks an alien language on live TV, so now Scanlon is after her too. Movie A and Movie B are destined to cross paths and when they do it’s interesting stuff, punctuated by a fantastic scene where Scanlon’s goon Boyd (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) rams our heroes’ car into a speeding train. Boyd is, we quickly learn, Noah’s only competent minion. The rest of his henchmen are easily thwarted by wacky pratfalls or — and this is really their kryptonite — standing behind them. They literally never look behind them, and thank goodness, because if they did they’d see Kellner just hanging out back there and the movie would be over in half an hour.
It’s hard to express (without getting into spoiler territory) how poorly thought out “Disclosure Day” really is, which is probably why Spielberg never takes his foot off the accelerator. It’s an incredibly fast-paced, exciting summer thrill ride — at least until the final scenes, which hit the brakes so hard the film almost flies through the windshield. It’s easy to see what Spielberg is getting at, because he spells it out clearly. Humanity’s problems could be solved with a liberal application of truth and empathy. But if Spielberg thinks everyone’s going to swallow that pill because there’s video evidence of alien life, he’s not engaging with our contemporary dilemmas. Thematically, it’s the film we needed decades ago. Today, it’s old-fashioned at best.
But it’s not entirely irrelevant. “Disclosure Day” is about a gigantic classified information dump that reveals the moral failings of the rich and powerful, uncovers sinister conspiracies and offers hope for the victims of injustice. It’s a little hard to believe “Disclosure Day” is supposed to be a big sci-fi allegory for the Epstein files, but intentional or not, the shoe fits. Spielberg just seems to think that releasing the files would make a huge difference, even though, sadly, life just seems to be moving on. Bad people are still doing bad things and getting away with it, and that’s been the status quo for too damn long.
That’s why it’s so hard to buy what Spielberg is selling, as far as deeper meaning is concerned. But nobody can ding his craftsmanship. “Disclosure Day” is filmed with all the slickness of a first-rate 1990s action movie, back when big budget blockbusters were consistently made with personality and style, whether they made sense or not. It’s an incredibly polished film, so hey, to hell with having a coherent point. Who doesn’t like shiny things?
The post ‘Disclosure Day’ Review: Steven Spielberg’s ‘X-Files’ Riff Wants to Believe a Little Too Much appeared first on TheWrap.
