Honestly, I expected worse from “Disclosure Day”….but I also expected much, MUCH better.
The best way to describe Steven Spielberg’s directing here is….it wants to be very matter-of-fact—clinical, almost, in the way it refuses to sensationalize—and yet somehow simultaneously vast, pulling back far enough that you feel like a bystander to history rather than a participant in it. It barely succeeds in the latter, but the former does feel a little hand-holdy and it flinches a lot while trying to keep itself steady; it’s two sides constantly dancing around the other and the few times there’s a genuine sense of enormity, it never lasts. All of this speaks towards flashes of the greatness Spielberg is still capable of reaching, just dumbed way the hell down.
I’m honestly struggling to put my thoughts on the production design into words; it’s not that Adam Stockhausen’s overall construction is flawed on a fundamental level. But it is somewhat contradictory to the basis of the story being presented. Augmenting a retro feel against a present day backdrop, there should be this sense of productive dissonance that the past is bleeding into the present in ways that feel genuinely unsettling and alive. Here, it never quite coheres into that. The locales feel assembled rather than inhabited, each space rendered with a kind of competent neutrality that drains the mystery out of the frame before it has a chance to accumulate with hardly much atmosphere offsetting that. Even something as vitally simple as the whistleblowers’ medium of choice, despite the present-day setting, comes off kind of corny.
Look, the presentation carries the vague sense of wonder and an old-school approach to science fiction that only Spielberg would know how to pull off…..and yet it feels curiously airless to a maddening degree; thankfully, Janusz Kaminski is able to rise to the challenge, if only just. His cinematography almost always keeps itself restless and understated in fluidity, rarely drawing attention to itself, but breathtaking in the moments it allows itself to open up with plenty of shots both artistically deliberate and visually honest with its delicacy and grace. It does come with some caveats though; Spielberg’s signature over-lit back lighting, soft lighting (which I’ve mentioned previously be harbored some resentment for before) and lens flare. For every frame that utilizes it to stark effect, the rest just scream style over substance.
Sarah Broshar’s editing helps with consistency for the most part; equal parts sturdy and clunky in the way it stages both the shots and the overall momentum of the project.
Pacing is supposed to have this sheer breathlessness to it; it never feels too long despite the two and half hour runtime and given how much is actually happening, it’s just enough momentum to keep your attention and ensure you don’t doze off. Unfortunately, its also spread pretty thin enough where the connective tissue between each setpiece barely feels like we’re progressing. Visual effects range from passable to downright abysmal with nothing there to occupy the space in-between, the tension meant to supply the movie’s ticking clock function never fully forms or accumulates, most of the humor is broadly fine, and nearly all the action sequences are crippled by astonishingly low energy; they’re decently staged—I’ll give them that—but even then, they’re all so clunky. Thankfully, the tone is up-to-par with what I expected it to be: that familiar Spielbergian register of quiet, creeping unease undercut by genuine curiosity, grounded enough to feel like a documentary and strange enough to remind you it isn’t.
Bless John Williams for still being this active in music composition going into his 90’s—and make no mistake, the score fits Spielberg like a glove—but something about it feels less like a new composition and more like a greatest hits shuffle. It just blends in with the rest of his work, and he’s almost pensive in how self-referential the raiding of his own back catalog is to sell and conjure this sense of wonder he’s already achieved before. Sound design does offset the generic pattern of the music score, helping balance out the restraint and attempt at grandeur, Paul Tazewell’s costume design rarely rises above the functional—though given the layered, meticulous work he did on the Wicked films, maybe the bar I’m holding him to isn’t entirely fair; the one exception being the way Margaret’s wardrobe tracks her arc, and it’s a pretty bog-standard PG-13 rating, all things considered.
This ensemble is a good chunk of the reason why the material has legs to stand on: everyone’s solid, carrying scenes on sheer presence alone and they each have something to bring to the table regardless of the range. Thankfully, the dialogue they’ve been given isn’t too taxing (although a wee bit corny) and while none of these characters are exactly written with a great deal of interiority, they’re given just enough definition and an outline that you find yourself genuinely invested in where they land; motivations are clear, relationships to one another legible, and there’s enough texture and curiosity in the margins to make you want to follow them even if the plot is doing them no favors.
Colman Domingo’s soothing tone brings a low, gravitational calm to an otherwise mysterious role, Colin Firth carries this almost ministerial authority and buttoned-up unraveling to every scene, Eve Hewson only just holds her own as someone questioning her faith in both God and people in general, and Josh O’Connor is solid casting as the hapless but morally driven everyman (at least the closest one the film has). But Emily Blunt is the anchor bridging them all and the one who gives out the best performance between them.
I’m going to be honest: I’m not quite sure this narrative worked on me. Think Close Encounters of the Third Kind fused with Minority Report and using every bullet point from the genre in the most formulaic framing possible; that’s not too big of a deterrent…..but it’s still rather generic. This is a glorified game of hot potato—Macguffin after Macguffin passed between competing hands in a chase that keeps insisting on its own urgency without ever actually generating any; Close Encounters stripped of its awe and reassembled into something blunter, shallower, and considerably less interesting than the sum of its borrowed parts. All the familiar chess pieces are on the board: the civilian drawn inexplicably into the orbit of something they can’t name, interlocking machinery of government and private power working to keep the lid on, the climactic brush with contact itself, and a slow-burn puzzle-box architecture that keeps ratcheting and cranking open toward higher physical and emotional stakes. To give it some credit, it’s straightforward once we get to the meat and potatoes of everything and you won’t get bored putting up with it, but not even halfway through the movie, the narrative already eats through to its own hollow center. Drama is underdeveloped, characters go through the bare minimum of growth with barely any inner conflict, it’s ripe with rather implausible plot contrivances and even more staggering plotholes, and the incompetence of the antagonists stick out like a massive sore thumb.
No starry-eyed innocence or spectacle actually arises out of the multitude of scenarios it repeatedly and vigorously sets up. Playing like a thriller docudrama that’s too cut-and-dry about what it believes, it never actually builds to anything surprising that we didn’t already see before; for a plot that asks you to REALLY think about ourselves and the state of the universe, the seams kinda crumble once you do.
Despite shades of Contact, Arrival, The Parallax View from 1974, or even The Vast of Night from 2019, its main themes and philosophical layerings—faith and providence, transparency being a shared societal right, animals being spirit guides, mainstream media running on scripts, the bloody ethical implications on releasing something so otherworldly and disturbing, and empathy running as an evolutionary force—don’t come off as strongly as I hoped it would. I’m of two minds on said overarching themes; there is an archaic quaintness to them to where I can appreciate where their aim is. In a film about consciousness, its natural for the journey to be from ignorance to enlightenment and if we were to consider this the unofficial third chapter after Close Encounters and E.T, I believe this is Spielberg asking us, in a future steeped in fear of the future and paranoia about our families, friends, and neighbors, to meet it whole.
Honestly, I think that’s also why I prefer the ending more than others: we’re not given the answers we WANT or necessarily NEED but the ones where we have to pick apart for ourselves. Upon the translation of the aliens words, everything fell into place and became something just as timely regarding the barriers of empathy and what Spielberg HOPES for us to take such revelations. This uneasy marriage between a filmmaker who’s every bit of distrustful of the country as we are and the optimism of the human spirit is him asking us to hold onto faith just a wee bit longer, similar to how the X-Files would normally conclude their individual tangents with a little hope. Because really, how do you expect something like this to give you a roadmap for something we realistically have none for, especially in light of how single-minded and individualistic our society has always been? All we can do is….take what we learned and be open to actually communicate with one another, LISTEN to each other, for each other, in spite of each other.
Yet even with that goodwill, this clunky, nervous loop of hand-wringing barely leads anywhere, especially when if you consider that every main character here epitomizes a dominated polity, open to manipulation by religion, defense industries or the media, everyone here in some way is a seeker desperate to break free from or reaffirm their various belief systems. And the movie barely digs into those long enough to where they all properly converge into a singular entity to where the final disclosure feels cathartic. It’s rather disappointing how the themes here gradually start feeling heavy-handed to the point where the dialogue is practically telling us what they want us to take away from it. Basing this around a story less about aliens invading and more about what happens when humanity receives a truth it can’t suppress or control can still work. But the reality is we’re living in a day and age where it’s next to impossible to believe anything the government gives out to us, and we’re more acutely tuned in to the multitude of skeletons in their closet. Everybody is retroactively plugged into everything and nothing at once all the time so if CBS or MSNBC broke into programming to tell us there were aliens in our midst, I severely doubt anything will change.
Previous movies in this genre have proven that merging classic optimism with today’s rather cynical affairs can work naturally…..so am I just looking at this wrong?
You want the dictionary definition of the word “watchable”? Disclosure Day is exactly that. It’s competently crafted and genuine flickers of that old-school Hollywood sense of wonder and wide-eyed sensibility that only Spielberg can achieve still remain, but this is also a case of him phoning home and phoning it in, burdening the ambition by tangents, drawn-out conclusions, and a few loose ends that curbstomp the momentum.
