Disclosure Day

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C-

            If somebody is talking about the greatest directors of all time and doesn’t mention Steven Spielberg, then they are just trying to be too cool for school. Jaws is my favorite film of all time. Add in Jurassic Park and the first three Indiana Jones movies, and you have five perfect, all-time great bangers. I don’t love E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind as much as most, but their massive influence can’t be denied. Then throw in the feel-good double feature of Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, not to mention the absolute classics that he produced (not directed) in the 80s: Back to the Future, The Goonies, Poltergeist and  Gremlins. Hell, I even love Hook. All together, one could reasonably argue that no person has had a greater influence on pop culture in the last 50 years than Steven Spielberg.

            And that’s why I really wanted to like Disclosure Day. For all of his greatness, Spielberg’s output over the last 20 years has been spotty at best and his last big box office hit was, unless I’m forgetting something, the mediocre War of the Worlds way back in 2005. For a long time, Disclosure Day was shrouded in mystery. For a couple of years, all we knew was that it involved aliens and would star Emily Blunt. Even the title wasn’t, um, disclosed until last fall. Amongst the mystery, Universal was touting it as Spielberg’s return to huge summer blockbusters. There was even speculation that it was secretly a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

            That wasn’t true. As it turns out, the real reason that Disclosure Day was kept such a secret is that it just isn’t very interesting. Despite a reported budget of $115 million, this isn’t really a return to the kind of big budget, crowd-pleasing popcorn flick that Spielberg churned out with shocking ease in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Instead, Disclosure Day is a 2 and ½ hour drama that is big on ideas and very short on execution. If you are planning to bring the family to the theater for this expecting something akin to Jurassic Park or E.T., then be warned that your kids will be bored to tears.

            The plot focuses on two humans that gradually (and I mean gradually) discover their ties to extraterrestrial life. Our leads are Josh O’Connor as Dr. Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity specialist or something, and Emily Blunt as Margaret Fairchild, a meteorologist. Daniel steals files from a top-secret government organization (led by Colin Firth) and goes on the run, while Margaret has an on-air freak out where she seems to start speaking an alien language and is suddenly telepathic. Their paths eventually cross and they form a plan to reveal the existence of aliens to the entire world, an event that they will call Disclosure Day. Those are just the broad strokes; this movie goes on forever.

            The fundamental problem with Disclosure Day is that it focuses on the lead up to the disclosure, when the most interesting stuff would be after the reveal is made. The movie even infuriatingly acknowledges and teases this, as it touches upon the enormous religious, social and political ramifications that this knowledge could have upon the world. The film’s events are even set against the backdrop of the start of World War III, something that is barely acknowledged and only serves as occasional background noise. People will sometimes have brief discussions about what alien life could mean to people and to humanity as a whole, but it is staggeringly shallow and surface-level. Then the movie just kind of ends when all of this should be coming to the forefront. I rarely see a movie that goes this frigging long without ever arriving at the interesting part. It would be like if Jurassic Park ended when people first saw a fucking dinosaur.

            Of all the big questions that are posed by this movie, here is the one that truly has me baffled: How the fuck did dinosaurs in Jurassic Park in 1993 look far more realistic than a fox and a bird do in Disclosure Day in 2026? The CGI in this movie is fucking atrocious. It looked atrocious in the trailers and I assumed that it would be fixed for the movie. No. Spielberg actually looked at this goofy-ass cartoon fox and thought “yep, that’s good enough.” It’s a fucking fox. You couldn’t hire a goddamn animal trainer to come to the set and get an actual fox to walk down the fucking street? You couldn’t at least make mechanical ones? The man made Jaws for fucking fuck’s sake.

            Emily Blunt and Colin Firth are the saving graces here. They are both excellent and, no disrespect to Josh O’Connor, but the film would have been better (and shorter) if it eliminated the Daniel character and just focused on Blunt and Firth. Blunt’s storyline is far more interesting and the movie grinds to a halt whenever it reverts back to the tired “guy on the run from secret government agency” plot. The movie itself looks fine, but nothing spectacular and not up to Spielberg’s old standards. He seems to have become enamored with lens flares, so much so that I would have thought that Michael Bay directed this if it weren’t for the lack of explosions.

            Disclosure Day isn’t a terrible movie, but it is a terrible disappointment. The Spielberg magic just isn’t here. Not to belabor the point, but its too damn long and only introduces interesting ideas without actually exploring them. Far from a return to form, this is a mediocre slog of a sci-fi movie. I truly hope that Spielberg has one more huge summer crowd-pleaser left in him, but Disclosure Day aint it.

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By Universal Pictures – http://www.impawards.com/2026/disclosure_day_ver13.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81856655