At age 79, Steven Spielberg has lost none of his sense of wonder. But it can feel like, in his return to the extraterrestrial after two decades away, he’s talking to himself when a character in Disclosure Day remarks: “I think you lost your faith in people”.
Spielberg has dubbed this film his closing instalment of a trilogy begun by Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and ET the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). But it also feels surprisingly affected by the voracious self-reflection he pursued in his last, and semi-autobiographical, movie The Fabelmans (2022), and its conclusion that the camera is the ultimate weapon of truth, even if that truth may be hard for us to swallow.
Yes, this is exquisitely woven, capital “E” entertainment, that’s funny and unabashedly sentimental in all the ways we expect Spielberg to be, with a particular action sequence primed to steal the breath out of your lungs. But he’s grown older; so has much of his audience. And faith, in its broadest terms – in people, in an existence beyond what we see before us, in the idea we can ameliorate humanity by embracing uncertainty – is harder won now. It’s no coincidence his camera lingers on the image of a hand wrapped so tightly around a gold crucifix that it’s started to bleed. Whatever we cling to, that grip will be challenged soon enough.
The film’s script, by his frequent collaborator David Koepp (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds), tosses us in at a fascinating juncture. Alien life has long been confirmed and concealed from the public. Disclosure Day opens in the middle of the fight to declassify that information. Whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity expert at the Wardex corporation, is on the run with a bit of alien technology, while his girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson) is in Wardex’s custody.
While in ET and Close Encounters the system was already an antagonistic force, the director here has stitched in the oppressive surveillance culture of Minority Report for what ultimately feels like the more realistic portrait of alien visitation. There’s no chance ET could have chowed down on Reese's Pieces with little Elliott – he’d have been bagged, tagged, and chopped into pieces before those flat feet even touched the dirt.
And Koepp, in his script, makes an especially timely distinction: it’s not the government in charge here, but the corporations. As Wardex’s CEO, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, as a thoroughly human menace) remarks, the president’s been out of the picture when it comes to UFO secrets for decades.
And while it’s at times a bit of an unwieldy story – with a jarring disinterest in any other nation beyond the USA – Koepp’s has made ample room for Disclosure Day to explore the political, the theological, and the existential all at the same time. Daniel and his lead whistleblower, Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), stand firm against the idea that corporations should have control over information any more than they should air or light (which they’d undoubtedly love to privatise, too). Jane, a former novitiate, wrestles with what the public release of classified information would do to a population in which even the belief in God is rooted in a need for certainty.
And meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), suddenly gifted with telepathic and polyglot abilities, must face reality in a more intimate way, tearing open the closed-off parts of her childhood years. While there’s phenomenal performance work across the board, it’s Blunt who really shines – she holds onto the lightness in Margaret, the denial of her own protagonist state, as an ordinary woman suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of omnipotence.
And while Disclosure Day has too many thoughts in its head, perhaps, to feel like one of those true, streamlined Spielberg classics, the filmmaker has hardly lost his touch for cinematic invention. Cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, his go-to since Schindler’s List (1993), adds a wintry day beauty to his 35mm portrait of the eastern states, while the camera circles its heroes or watches them in reflections in a way that manages to encompass both the film’s curiosity and its paranoia.
The aliens themselves are nothing new to look at (and there’s certainly a reference or two to Spielberg’s own past work to be spotted). But that’s entirely the point. Disclosure Day sees the director return to his past with fresh eyes.
Dir: Steven Spielberg. Starring: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo, Eve Hewson, Wyatt Russell. Cert 12A, 146 minutes
‘Disclosure Day’ is in cinemas from 10 June
