Disclosure Day (Cert 12A)
Rating: 4 out of 5
As the US football team prepares to kick off its World Cup campaign just down the freeway from Hollywood, the greatest living movie director has a hat-trick on his mind. Steven Spielberg has already made two of the finest alien-visitation flicks of all time. Can he, with Disclosure Day, add a third?
Nearly, but not quite is the answer. Those with planet-sized brains might keep up, but the master of cinematic storytelling makes too many demands of the rest of us.
Bluntly, I found Disclosure Day more than a little baffling, neither an instant masterpiece like Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977), nor a glorious crowd-pleaser to compare with ET The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Happily, I went with an astrophysicist friend who explained the really puzzling bits to me afterwards.
Nevertheless, it’s still terrifically gripping even if you’re not always sure what’s going on – and, by the way, this review contains what I prefer to think of as comprehension aids rather than spoilers, my version of those Brodie’s Notes which demystify Shakespeare.
Is it fanciful to call Spielberg a silver-screen Shakespeare? Either way, his last picture was his autobiographical charmer The Fabelmans (2022), which showed us how he became a film-maker in the first place. Disclosure Day, for all its narrative complexities, once again leaves us grateful that he did. And how satisfying that he has chosen a trio of British leads in Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor and Colin Firth. They, too, are in tip-top form.
All three, along with the great man himself, were in Leicester Square last Thursday for the film’s UK premiere. Spielberg recalled beforehand that the first movie he came to London to unveil was Raiders Of The Lost Ark, way back in 1981. It was a reminder of just how long he’s been at the top of his game. He’ll turn 80 later this year yet remains a consummate entertainer.
Disclosure Day starts with a whoosh and never lets up. An American cyber security expert called Daniel Kellner (O’Connor) is threatening to expose a closely guarded state secret, namely that unarguable evidence of alien life has long been suppressed by the authorities in the form of a shadowy organisation called Wardex. This outfit is run by Noah Scanlon (Firth), a tight-lipped Briton.
Steven Spielberg chose a trio of British leads in Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor and Colin Firth
Emily Blunt plays a TV weather forecaster, Margaret Fairchild, whose profound connection to Daniel is not fully explained until much later in the film
Daniel is about to blow the whistle on some truly furtive shenanigans stretching back decades, so when he goes on the run with his girlfriend (nicely played by Eve Hewson, Bono’s daughter), Scanlon wants him captured as a global imperative. Disclosing what he knows, Scanlon says gravely, would ‘tip the balance in an already destabilised world’.
With all this, Spielberg – and screenwriter David Koepp, also his collaborator on Jurassic Park (1993) and War Of The Worlds (2005) – doubtless have certain real-life American whistleblowers in mind, such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. We can guess where the famously liberal Spielberg stands on their activities. At any rate, Daniel is depicted unequivocally as a goodie, with a sympathetic ally in Wardex defector Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo).
But Daniel is also deeply tormented, intensified by a mysterious device he has pinched, which has extra-terrestrial origins and appears to imbue him with telepathic powers. And where, meanwhile, is Emily Blunt? She plays (brilliantly) a TV weather forecaster, Margaret Fairchild, whose profound connection to Daniel, along with her own peculiar powers, are not fully explained until much later in the film.
As for Spielberg’s powers, he throws in some genuinely exhilarating chase sequences, perhaps by way of compensation for keeping us guessing about the plot. He and Koepp also chuck us lines to make us feel better. ‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ laments Daniel. He’s not the only one.
Undoubtedly, Disclosure Day is a film that will reward more than one viewing. I need to see it probably twice more to appreciate its many nuances, which include some striking religious imagery and a few pleasingly wry references to AI.
It lasts almost two and a half hours and befuddles but never drags, with an ending that will delight anyone who thinks all those alleged UFO conspiracies and cover-ups, such as the 1947 Roswell Incident, conceal something we all need to know.
Disclosure Day opens in cinemas today
