Disclosure Day

It's not a spoiler to say that the premise of Steven Spielberg's latest sci-fi thriller is that the US government has been suppressing evidence of alien visitations, crashes, and technology dating back to before the Roswell, New Mexico incident eight decades ago. But it is a spoiler to say that because it is the big climactic reveal in the movie. Disclosure Day is a wildly out-of-touch fantasy that pits a small group of government whistleblowers determined to get the truth out to a polarized public that desperately needs to learn that we are not alone in the universe, against a determined, well-organized army of government contractors who are certain that if that polarized public did understand this, our whole society would collapse. The film doesn't seem to understand that our society collapsed a while ago—long before this movie went into production or this screenplay got written—and government conspiracies about aliens are so last millennium that they seem quaint and adorable. One has to laugh to keep from crying when imagining how little most people would care if what occurs at the end of this movie actually happened, as a sizable percentage of the population would simply dismiss it as fake news.

Perhaps if Spielberg had hired a writer other than David Koepp, who never met a major motion picture assignment he couldn't render mildly disappointing, they'd have advocated for a movie that explored the possible meanings and reasons for alien visitation. Instead, we get a lot of vague dialogue about how the mere act of acknowledging alien existence could cause people to doubt their faith in God and their fellow man to profound and potentially dangerous degrees. (Really?) Of course, being a Spielberg picture, there's a lot about unlocking childhood traumas and processing childhood experiences in order to become the kind of fully evolved human who can handle the truth. Very little of that thematic material works.

What does work is the old-school suspense the master director serves up and sustains over the two hours before his film exposes itself as the great big nothing that it is. Emily Blunt, who, after more than fourty feature film roles, is still revealing unseen shades, colors, and tones in her characters, gives a wonderful performance as a Kansas City, TV meteorologist whose latent psychic abilities are mysteriously awakened. Blunt's Margaret Fairchild is the familiar Spielberg everyman through whom this fantastic story unfolds. Margaret ditches her boyfriend (Wyatt Russell) and teams up with Dr. Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity expert who possesses discs containing all the secrets of Earth's alien visitations and their cruel treatment at the hands of our government. Josh O'Connor plays Daniel, and I wish he were as much fun to watch as Blunt, since he has more screen time, but he also does a fine job playing a more informed Spielbergian everyman. Colin Firth is the ostensible villain, Noah Scanlon, the head of the corporation responsible for guarding the secrets, and Colman Domingo plays Hugo Wakefield, a defector from the corporation who is coordinating the events that will eventually enable the eponymous info dump.

The movie takes its time doling out the exposition, and though the pacing is leisurely, it never feels slow. On the contrary, this is a pretty riveting picture, even though we are pretty sure from the get-go it won't build to any significant revelations. Spielberg and Janusz Kamiński, his cinematographer since Schindler's List, devise and execute their expected series of incredibly complex and involved camera moves that somehow never upstage the story or characters; often, the intricacies of these shots are barely noticeable on first viewing. The same can't praise can't be given to some of the CGI work—there are deer in this 2026 movie that look 100 times more artificial than the dinosaurs in Spielberg's Jurassic Park, made some 35 years earlier. Still, this 145-minute chase movie flies by, delivering all sorts of comic delights and thrilling episodes. It's an impressive but ultimately empty picture.