Disclosure Day
"Disclosure Day" is Steven Spielberg's second best alien movie to date.
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“Disclosure Day” (in theaters beginning Friday, June 12) is legendary director Steven Spielberg’s fifth alien movie after “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” (the movie that made me fall in love with movies as a young child), “War of the Worlds” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” and it’s the second best of the bunch.
Josh O’Connor stars as Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity expert-turned-whistleblower who’s been goaded into leaking classified video files proving the existence of alien life by his mentor Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo).
Both Kellner and Wakefield worked for a shadowy organization known as Wardex prior to defecting. Wardex is overseen by the ruthless Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, playing way against type). Scanlon and his overzealous crony Casper Boyd (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) will go to any lengths necessary to retrieve and suppress these files including kidnapping Kellner’s girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson, Bono’s daughter).
Meanwhile, Kansas City, Mo. TV meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (a winning Emily Blunt) is having herself a moment. She longs to work in another market, but her bartender/musician boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) is perfectly content where they are.
A cardinal flies through the window of their loft apartment and makes a connection with Fairchild. Jackson shoos the bird away, but the bond remains. Fairchild suddenly speaks Russian when answering one of Jackson’s questions, later speaks Korean to a visiting diplomat, can see into the pasts of those around her and mimic their loved ones and speaks a mathematical alien language on-air prior to passing out and getting herself hospitalized.
Kellner and Fairchild are connected through an incident from their childhoods and are the key to making Disclosure Day a reality.
“Disclosure Day” is a lengthy watch at 145 minutes, but it’s never a boring one. It hits the ground running and rarely lets up. I do wish it would’ve chilled a bit to help give us better and clearer characterizations of Kellner and Wakefield, but O’Connor and Domingo are good enough actors who are still able to make an impact. Firth does interesting work as Scanlon and screenwriter David Koepp (reuniting with Spielberg for the fifth time and sharing story credit with him) shrewdly shades him with glances of humanity.
The women fare far better. Blunt steals the show, lends the proceedings some much-needed humor and her Fairchild has the clearest arc of all the characters. Hewson imbues Blankenship with considerable humanity, which made me gravely concerned for the character’s well-being throughout. I also really responded to the work of aces character actress Elizabeth Marvel as Sister Maura, the nun mentor of Blankenship.
There’s not a ton of action in the picture, but Spielberg is still a master of staging and a lot of these sequences sing. Much of the movie sees Spielberg building tension (another area at which he clearly excels) and he’s greatly aided in this pursuit by maestro John Williams, who at 94 years young is still turning in top-tier work.
“Disclosure Day” has a lot of interesting ideas about religion and humanity’s place in the universe. Spielberg seems to be suggesting that people deserve the truth whether it’s concerning Area 51 … or the Epstein files. The conclusion may infuriate audiences with its obliqueness, but there's a certain brilliance to it that allows the viewer to graft their own thoughts and feelings upon it. I don’t think it could’ve or should’ve ended any differently.