The idea that aliens will save humanity from itself has been a theme of science fiction forever.  Steven Spielberg, the director of Disclosure Day, has already made a classic devoted to this topic in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  While it’s unfair to hold Spielberg to the standard he set for himself decades ago, it’s also true that in comparison, his latest alien adventure is a huge disappointment.  All of the wonder, curiosity and humanity that defined his earlier science fiction film is absent.  In their place is a lumbering, talkative and largely inert film about empathy and revealing “the truth” about alien visitations.  The movie’s heart is in the right place, but that doesn’t compensate for the overall lack of excitement the movie expresses for its own subject matter.

In a bizarre coincidence, the opening scene evokes the America 250th birthday bash at the White House with a wrestling match in a thunderous arena.  Sitting nervously amongst the crowd, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) looks like an uncomfortable liberal in a sea of rowdy red-staters.  All he needs is an Obama “Hope” tee shirt to look completely out-of-place.

Daniel’s there to make a deal with a non-governmental agency named Wardex that’s holding his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) hostage.  Daniel stole secrets from them and they’ll trade her for his backpack full of thumb drives.  Since Daniel worked for Wardex and knows what they’re capable of, there’s no point in having clench-jawed thugs give Jane a bloody lip, but there’s a lot of this movie that doesn’t make sense.

Daniel meets his ex-boss Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) and hands over his backpack, but flunkies alert Scanlon that something’s missing.  Daniel still has an odd-looking device that looks like a wand, and when he holds it forth Scanlon warns him not to close his hand on it.  Presumably something bad will happen if he does, but we learn what..

Daniel escapes with Jane and calls his covert handler Hugo (Colman Domingo), who tells him to destroy his phone and hide.  Jane directs him to the convent where she was a novitiate, which she never told Daniel about for the three years they’ve been together.  Jane presses Daniel on what he’s done to justify all the negative attention, but he says that she wouldn’t believe him if he told her.

In the morning, Daniel is met by Santiago (Tommy Martinez), a member of a group of twelve former Wardex employees working for Hugo.  (Hugo’s St. Peter and Santiago and the rest are his apostles.)  Hugo wants to get Daniel to safety and the files released to the world–but not via the internet.  They have to be shown on live television, or people would believe they’re fake.  Umm, yeah.  Even though Daniel tells Jane to stay behind, she tags along and becomes the liability you expect her to be.

Meanwhile, in Kansas City, meteorologist Margaret Fairchild is fretting over her audition tape for an anchor gig.  If she gets it, she and her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) would need to move yet again.  (Jackson is an unserious person because he wears flannel and is a musician.)  When a cardinal flies into their apartment, Margaret briefly talks in Russian.  How weird.

On her drive to the station, she talks her way out of a speeding ticket by telling the cop personal things about him she has no way of knowing.  When Margaret arrives at work, she has a conversation with a Korean official in, you guessed it, Korean.  Then, when she gives the weather report, she speaks in a series of odd clicks and falls to the ground.

In the ramshackle place they’re holed-up, Daniel reveals to Jane why he betrayed Wardex.  He shows her a disturbing video with scientists probing a screaming extra-terrestrial.  Although Jane is visibly shaken, she questions whether Daniel should proceed with his info dump.  Without faith the world would somehow be in even worse shape.  (WWIII is brewing in the background, so I’m not sure anything could make matters worse.)

Margaret’s MRI is clean, so the doctor asks if she has bad dreams.  Jackson, who is now in unsupportive jerk mode, says that she sings in her sleep and mentions that Margaret’s father had Parkinson’s.  Oy.  When Margaret senses that the people outside her room aren’t the FBI, she insists they bolt.

While Daniel confers with Hugo again, Scanlon uses a wand like the one we saw earlier to mentally connect with Jane.  In what becomes a repetitive gimmick, Scanlon forces Jane to reveal her location, he sends his team of highly trained badasses to grab them, but Daniel and Jane escape because Scanlon’s team is unbelievably inept.

With her newfound mental abilities, Margaret knows Daniel’s location and tries to allay Jackson’s concerns over her recent behavior.  Jackson, however, is both jealous of Daniel (who he’s never met) and believes Margaret is insane and rats her out to the authorities. Margaret senses that Jackson isn’t on her side and ditches him to find Daniel.

Scanlon’s wand-usage reveals Daniel and Jane’s motel via a dumb contrivance.  But before his team captures Daniel, he gives her his wand and she escapes out the bathroom window.  Yes, these security professionals don’t know how to secure a perimeter.

With Daniel in his clutches, Scanlon uses the wand to chat with Hugo, and the two debate on the merits of whether the people have the right to know the truth about alien visits going back 79 years.  Turns out that Wardex has been keeping all of the information secret ever since Nixon was careless.  (It’s one of the movie’s few moments of levity.)

Eventually, Scanlon has Hugo’s location and Daniel in his grasp.  That leaves it up to Margaret to get past Scanlon’s armed guards, rescue Daniel, understand her calling and tell the world that aliens are real.  Never doubt the fortitude of a meteorologist!

Recommendation

Back in 2002, Steven Spielberg appeared in Austin Powers in Goldmember as himself.  I recalled his cameo while watching Disclosure Day, because like Powers, Spielberg has lost his mojo when it comes to directing blockbusters.  Spielberg hasn’t made a big special effects vehicle like this in a while–Ready Player One was released eight years ago–so some rust is to be expected.  However, his previous film, The Fabelmans is one of my favorites from 2022 and received seven Academy Award nominations.  That the same director who made that film and this silly and plodding mess is confounding.

Comparing Spielberg’s recent work with his classics isn’t fair, because he’s not the same person he was when he made Close Encounters or ET.  He’s aged, and maybe that’s the simple reason why this movie moves in fits and starts.  Spielberg’s skill has routinely enabled him to convey ideas and feelings through imaginative visuals.  Disclosure Day is the opposite of that approach, because it settles for using mild-mannered discourse to get its point across.  It’s one thing for a director to want to have a dialogue with the audience about serious matters, like the lack of empathy in our world and whether knowing aliens exist would benefit humanity in the long run.  It’s another thing entirely to have characters talk about it, which turns this movie into the equivalent of armchair rambling.

The movie is very talky for a blockbuster, so Spielberg must have felt compelled to include multiple chase scenes to break up the steady flow of expository dialogue.  However, these chases quickly become repetitive, where a fleet of black Dodge Challengers speeds after our intrepid heroes.  They also routinely defy logic, which made me wonder if Spielberg was pulling my leg.  There’s a theory going around claiming that “celestial intervention” is the reason why none of these scenes make sense, but that raises more questions than it answers.

Even more shocking is how bad the CGI is in this film.  Movies don’t use real animals anymore, but at no point did I believe that a real bird, fox, moose or whatever was actually present.  Don’t even get me started on this film’s aliens, who resemble those in The X-Files or Alien Autopsy.

There’s also the matter of the film’s dark palette, a combination of blacks, browns and blues.  Janusz Kaminski has been Spielberg’s DP for a long time, and is usually reliable.  The movie looks like Minority Report had been left out in the rain.  I saw this movie on an IMAX-sized screen and it was a dreary experience.

Josh O’Connor’s performance was underwhelming.  He’s given engaging performances before (The Crown, Challengers), so I have no idea why O’Connor’s so colorless.  Thankfully, Emily Blunt is free to showcase her range, and her live-wire performance is the best part of the movie.  Colman Domingo is good as the guru, and the movie should have used him more.  Colin Firth’s villainous turn is hindered by having him spend most of the film sitting in a chair sweating profusely.  Wyatt Russell really needs a new agent, because playing the jerk so often is getting tiresome.  Courtney Grace is quite moving as the anchor tasked with providing commentary to the alien tapes over the air.

The only disclosure worth mentioning about Disclosure Day is that Steven Spielberg has lost his magic touch with blockbusters.  The movie is boring for long stretches, is filled with nonsensical action sequences and lacks tension throughout.  Emily Blunt nearly rescues it, but this clunky contraption never takes flight.  Not Recommended.

Analysis

A great director can make a bad film.  Even Steven Spielberg isn’t immune, because he was responsible for The Lost World: Jurassic Park.  An argument can be made that it’s “mindless fun”, but it’s still a terrible movie, especially in comparison to the film that preceded it.  (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is borderline good but occasionally terrible.)

With Disclosure Day, Spielberg managed to make something even worse than his tired Jurassic Park sequel.  His current film is so inept that I struggled with the fact that this is the same person who made The Fabelmans, a film that I consider to be one of his best.  Did Spielberg forget how to direct a movie in the intervening four years?  No, but it’s clear that he’s lost his ability to make big-scale spectacles.

Disclosure Day is often stupefying in its badness.  Movies often depend upon our suspension of disbelief, but this one is so frequently silly that I liked it less the more it went on.  While it’s possible that Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp have more going on than was readily apparent to me, the film is so incoherent that the only explanation that makes sense is that the emphasis was on getting to the big reveal, regardless of what it took to get there.

How to make a bad science fiction film.

The plot device

One of the best jokes in the Naked Gun reboot is when Liam Neeson’s Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr. finds an object labeled “P.L.O.T. Device”  In Disclosure Day, the plot device is the alien wand, which magically advances the plot whenever it’s stuck in a ditch.

Given that the wand is alien technology, one would expect that it would enable the bearer to do incredible things with it.  But the movie bestows god-like powers upon the wand without limitations.  The device can do anything demanded by the plot, without fail.

Noah Scanlon used the wand to connect with Jane and Hugo hundreds of miles away simply by holding it and looking at a picture of them.  He’s also able to physically control people with it for hours at a time.  Whenever Scanlon needs to know wherever Daniel or Hugo are hiding, all he needs to do is use the wand.  And even though using it puts Scanlon in great physical distress, it never incapacitates him.

Margaret Fairchild uses the wand to make Hugo, his followers and the replica of her childhood home disappear.  She later uses the wand to give the entire television studio electricity to broadcast her message.

For reasons left unexplained, the wand can only be touched by certain people.  When one of Scanlon’s agents grabs it, he disappears and reappears someplace else.  Why?

Finally, why does the wand turn to ashes while Margaret wields it for only a few minutes, while Scanlon uses it for hours?

A dull villain

Noah Scanlon could have been an interesting villain.  He’s a familiar character in Spielberg’s films, an old expert who’s actually evil.  Scanlon even resembles Jurassic Park’s John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), another gray-bearded, British chap who’s ill-equipped to handle real-world problems.  Colin Firth has been an excellent actor throughout his career, and has an Academy Award.  But Scanlon’s character is depicted in the most boring ways possible.

When Scanlon’s not glaring at his underlings in his command center, he’s chair-bound and hooked up to IVs.  His main interactions with the heroes is through the wand.  Even when he’s mentally connected to someone, he’s still seated and mild-mannered.  Scanlon is never threatening because he’s not imposing.

Scanlon’s surrender at the end puzzled me, but the “mind control” theory makes sense there because there was an alien in the green room.

An incompetent security team

Even though Scanlon and Wardex have unlimited resources at their disposal, his security team is ridiculously incompetent.  Every time they have Daniel cornered, he slips through their fingers because they don’t do basic security team things.

In the beginning, Daniel escapes because he threatens everyone with the wand.  Why not simply shoot him?  When he drives off, why not follow him with drones?  How about putting an air tag into his coat pocket?

Even though Scanlon has a room full of monitors filled with serious-looking minions, he always needs to use the wand to locate Daniel.

When the security team goes to the cabin where Daniel and Jane are hiding, they don’t do the most basic thing, which would be to secure the perimeter.  They don’t even bother looking behind them, which enables Daniel to steal one of their cars.  And because they’re far away from the cabin to begin with, they allow Daniel to smash into the cabin and get Jane.

After a purposeless chase, the team then gets fooled by the oldest cliche in action movies, the “car went over the cliff” ruse.

Later, when the team goes to get Daniel at the motel, none of them go around the back to make sure neither he nor Jane slips out the bathroom window.

I can’t remember his name, but the one security guy trying to stop Daniel and Margaret by ramming their car into the oncoming train must have forgotten he had a gun.  Couldn’t he just shoot out their tires?  If the release of the alien files is so damaging, why does he try to kill them in the most difficult way imaginable?

For those people who believe that “mind control” was the reason why the security team was so ineffective, I would respond that it makes no sense for the aliens to help our heroes to escape, but never come to their aid when they’re in mortal peril.

The old ball and chain

Jane is present in the beginning to provide a pro-Christian counterpoint to Daniel releasing the alien files without concern for the consequences.  But when that philosophical argument reaches a dead-end, she’s reduced to being another plot device, constantly revealing Daniel’s escape plans to Scanlon.  And once Daniel is captured, she goes into hiding until the plot needs her in the end.

Muddled empathy

The movie’s message is that without empathy, humanity is doomed.  I whole-heartedly agree with that sentiment.  However, there’s nothing about Margaret’s powers that involve empathy.  She’s basically a telepath who tells people’s intimate feelings to disarm them.  Her power isn’t empathy, but mind control.

A bland hero

Unlike the typical Spielbergian hero, Daniel is soft-spoken and dour.  Even though he’s spent years avoiding others since obtaining an alien-level understanding of mathematics, he doesn’t have a single interesting characteristic about him.  One would think that he would have a few quirks to him as a result of being a loner, but no.  He’s just sullen and in a funk the entire movie.

Honestly, the movie would have played out exactly the same if Daniel had given his backpack of secrets to Margaret and died.  The movie then could have devoted itself entirely to her and her journey, which would have been more interesting.

I suspect that Daniel is a co-lead so that the film would appeal to both boys and girls.  But the fact that Daniel is such a vacuous character throughout makes me think that he was either added or was kept alive past the first act so that Margaret wouldn’t be the sole lead.

The omniscient character

I like Hugo, but the movie never bothers to explain how he knows what he knows.  According to the movie’s logic, only Daniel and Margaret understand alien-speak, so he couldn’t communicate with the surviving alien.  So how does he know that Margaret received special powers from her alien friends when she was a child?  How does he know what Margaret’s childhood home looked like, with precise detail?

Terrible CGI

If Disclosure Day’s reported budget of $160m is true, then that would explain the movie’s cartoonish-looking CGI animals and aliens.  After seeing Spielberg do amazing things with special effects for decades, it’s shocking to see him reduced to bargain-basement VFX.  Someone mentioned to me online that the animals are supposed to look fake on purpose.  Well, if that’s the case why didn’t Jackson mention that the cardinal looked like a fake bird?

A clunky ending

It’s odd describing Disclosure Day’s ending as its best part, because it’s not particularly exciting.  All of the clips are a grade above “UFO encounters” material, but not by much.  Was Spielberg intentionally evoking Dan Rather’s “Peace” by having Margaret conclude with “Listen”?  And we never know how humanity handles the fact that aliens are real because the movie ends without showing us.

Too many contrivances

What befalls Disclosure Day is that the plot is a silly house of cards that doesn’t hold up to basic scrutiny.  The only way the movie works is if you pin every inexplicable thing that happens as the result of  “mind control”.  The problem with the movie isn’t its message, but how it delivers it.

While I agree that empathy is sorely needed in this world, and I do want to believe, neither of those well-intended messages in Disclosure Day absolve it from being a very dumb and poorly made movie.