Disclosure Day - Movie Review

Steven Spielberg's UFO film Disclosure Day hits theaters this weekend, so let's see them aliens. Hello everybody, I'm Dan Merl here with my review of Disclosure Day. The review embargo was just lifted and I have a chance to share my thoughts on the movie. This is Spielberg's first film since The Fablemans back in 2022. He also wrote the story for the film with the screenplay coming from David Koepp. It's Koepp's fifth time writing a Steven Spielberg film and his first since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The plot for Disclosure Day has been a guarded secret almost as much as the secret of alien existence itself, so I'm going to give you a very basic overview of the film. This is all stuff from trailers or that you find out in the first 10 or 15 minutes of the movie. Disclosure Day finds the world on the brink of war, but behind that a secret government agency is fighting to keep proof of alien existence from the public. Josh O'Connor plays Daniel Kellner, a computer genius in possession of said proof. Emily Blunt plays Margaret Fairchild, an airy local weather reporter who suddenly develops fantastic abilities. Side note, Margaret works at a local Kansas City news station, which coincidentally was where I saw my critic screening of this film. The audience that I was in was probably the only one in the world that's going to clap at the on-screen location identifiers in Disclosure Day. Colin Firth plays the head of the secret government agency, Wardex, who is using every tool in his arsenal to keep the public from finding out the truth about aliens. And Colman Domingo plays Hugo Wakefield, the head of the Truth Movement, who's directing his sleeper agents from the shadows while preparing the endgame. All of this intrigue will result, if the truthers have their way, in Disclosure Day, the day that humanity is presented with absolute proof that we are not alone in the universe. This is the 4th time that Steven Spielberg has dealt directly with aliens after Close Encounters, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, and War of the Worlds, and it's a subject matter that he's obviously very fascinated with. This is not necessarily a big picture story, a rumination on the existence of aliens, but a moment by moment journey through the potential revelation of the existence of aliens. However, inside of that journey, we do get discussions about the ramifications of alien existence on things like government and religion, and whether humanity can even handle such a disclosure. You can tell that these are questions that Spielberg himself has pondered over the years, and this feels like an extension of the first feature that he ever wrote, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, back in 1977. If that movie was about the wonder of aliens, this one is about the potential complications that would come with it. As a huge fan of Steven Spielberg, I think that his career can be divided into a few different eras, but this film feels like a combination of a lot of the work that he's done over the years. It has a lot of elements of the dark futurism of Minority Report, which actually closely matches our real world, along with the more awestruck filmmaking that we saw in his early movies. Given that the story is literally about the clash of those two things, I think the combination works really well, and I liked the look of the film, which is done through the lens of Spielberg's long-time cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski. We also get another collaboration between Steven Spielberg and composer John Williams, one of the greatest cinematic combinations of all time, and given that it's John Williams, it's probably not a shock that the music in this movie is really good. There's one track in particular that plays under a crucial scene that has a piano part that I think is very reminiscent of another piece of score that John Williams wrote for E.T., which is my favorite movie score of all time, so John Williams, genius, breaking news. The acting in this movie is also very strong, especially from Emily Blunt. This is one of the best performances of her career, if not the best. She's asked to play a lot of notes in this movie, from broad comedy to sheer panic, and she nails every single one of those notes, along with Indy Navaretti from Obsession. This is one of the clear frontrunners for me for performance of the year so far. Josh O'Connor I think is also good in the movie, but I felt like his character was more a function of the plot. The story kind of flows through him, but I didn't feel like his character got as much depth to play with. Colin Firth plays a suitably threatening antagonist who can wield terrifying power to get what he wants, and Colman Domingo I think provides kind of a warm heart at the center of the film, though I think he too could have used a little bit more character depth. And in service of the saying that there are no small parts, Courtney Grace, who's a former TV anchor, plays the same role in a critical sequence of the film and I think absolutely crushes it. It's a role that might seem inconsequential, but it kind of grounds the impact of what we're seeing on screen at the time. And Wyatt Russell also does a great job as Margaret's boyfriend, scoring several laughs of his own. He's a standout in the film until the script just kind of runs out of things to do with him. If the movie has a main weakness, I think it is the screenplay from David Kapp. I have a very up and down relationship with David Kapp. He has written some great movies, and he's also written some terrible ones. And I think when you look at this film, what it has are a lot of great scenes that are placed into a somewhat average story. And I don't think that that is conflicting. I think you can have great scenes in a good screenplay. It basically meant for me that the connective tissue between those great scenes could have been a lot stronger, so that they all flowed together, flowed into and out of each other, and made the overall screenplay great instead of just parts of it. However, the scenes that are great are great in a lot of different ways, whether it's heavier dialogue scenes or action sequences. Disclosure Day offers a lot of different things, including frequent and effective humor, creative action set pieces, genuine insights into the nature of humanity, and a suspenseful ending. The script does, at times, though, dip into what I think are some of Kapp's weaknesses, including some plot contrivances, and some things that I thought were just a little too unbelievable, even in a movie that's nominally about aliens. But those things don't kill the movie, I just think that those few things, along with the overall average nature of how the story itself flows together, holds the movie back from being truly great, even though it does achieve greatness in some individual moments. Steven Spielberg has a gift, not just for depicting amazing things on screen, but also for making the audience feel the awesomeness of these things, just as much as the characters in the movie feel the awesomeness. And he was able to do that for me, again, with a lot of stuff in Disclosure Day. It may not have been awe at the scale of some of his greatest works, but it's still awe, and I think that he is one of the greatest visual directors of all time. There are shots in this movie that prove that he has not lost his touch, and I particularly liked how he and Kaminsky used reflections in the often combining two separate elements in one frame in really interesting ways. Disclosure Day is an incredibly dynamic film, and it's over two hours long, but still flew by for me, even at times when the story took a little bit of a stumble. Directing a movie, a really good movie, is kind of like conducting a symphony, and there are very few people, I think in the history of moviemaking, that do it better than Steven Spielberg. Any frustrations that I might feel about Disclosure Day really come from the fact that I think it could have been an absolute masterpiece, something that would have been an even more effective bookend to Spielberg's career. It's not over, but I just mean a movie at the beginning and a movie at the end, along with 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The elements are all there, but they just don't all come together at the same time, which, by the way, shouldn't be necessarily an expectation for any movie, because there are very few movies where all of the elements come together in that kind of beautiful symphony that I was talking about of a truly great film. But I think that the possibility was there with Disclosure Day, and I'm actually anxious to watch the film a second time, now that I kind of know where the story's going and what the character connections all are, to see just how effective it is once you get past that sort of first blush of seeing the movie without having seen anything other than trailers. But what I can say after my first viewing is that it features some fantastic acting, some deep questions, striking imagery, and a curiosity about humanity's place in the universe that can only come from a filmmaker who's genuinely passionate about the subject matter. So on my personal scale, I'm putting Disclosure Day very healthfully into the It's Good category, inching up toward the See It Now category, and I think that this may go down as the signature film of Spielberg's late career, unless of course he cooks up something even better than this movie in the next several years, which would absolutely delight me. So those are my thoughts on Disclosure Day. What do you think? Are you heading out to theaters to see it this weekend? Let me know down in the comments below, and as always, stay tuned right here for the latest in movie news, reviews, box office, and more. Until next time, stay safe, watch the skies, and I'll see you then.