Spoilers ahead, but the big ones will be clearly marked.
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind" is my favorite Steven Spielberg movie, and one of my favorite movies period. When I learned that Spielberg was making a new movie about aliens and conspiracies, I was excited but also full of trepidation. I haven't connected to many of Spielberg's most recent films in the last few years, especially the genre efforts like "Ready Player One" and "The BFG." Was "Disclosure Day" going to have any of the old Spielberg cinematic magic from his older classics? Was I simply too old and jaded? Were his filmmaking sensibilities now too nostalgia-driven and schmaltzy for me?
I'm sorry to report that "Disclosure Day" is a deeply mediocre effort for a Spielberg film, one where every issue I've ever had with Spielberg's work feels magnified. As advertised, "Disclosure Day" is about a group of people trying to reveal the truth about alien activity on earth. It turns out that all significant evidence and information about aliens is being suppressed by a government contractor, Wardex, led by the ruthless Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), that has grown into a malignant, unchecked entity with too much power. One of the employees, a cybersecurity expert named Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), steals information with the intent to release it to the public. He and his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) go on the run, with help from another Wardex defector, Hugo (Colman Domingo). Meanwhile, a Kansas City weather lady, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), mysteriously starts speaking in different languages and displaying strange powers. She and her skeptical boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) also start being chased by Wardex operatives.
Written by David Koepp, who has often collaborated with Steven Soderberg in recent years, "Disclosure Day" feels like a film of a much older, less cynical era. There are earnest declarations of wild concepts ("sometimes they take the forms of animals"), plot holes everywhere you look, and big, important questions raised without much expectation of trying to answer them. Most of the plot boils down to getting characters from point A to point B, juggling Macguffins, and getting into improbable action set pieces. And some of those action set pieces are very good, like one involving a car getting dragged alongside a train. An extremely effective suspense sequence in the first act involves Scanlon using a mysterious device to eerily interrogate and control Jane from a distance. Spielberg has always been good about creating images we haven't seen before and I loved some of the individual shots here - soldiers crashing through an invisible window, or a throng of camera lights through a windowpane looking like a starfield.
However, the storytelling is often very heavy-handed, with every emotional beat underlined by a far too noticeable John Williams score that is not doing the movie any favors. The main characters were so credulous in such a mannered way that it kept taking me out of the picture. Every time Emily Blunt did a Jedi mind trick, I wanted to roll my eyes - not at her, but at the overly reverent presentation of it. I sat through two hours of "Disclosure Day" knowing how every single scene would play out, admiring the committed work of all the actors and crew involved, but being completely emotionally unengaged with anything onscreen. I was ready to throw in the towel and write this off as a handsome, well-intentioned disappointment.
And then the last fifteen minutes of the movie happened, and suddenly everything worked. Here I will spoil the ending, because I can't talk about it unless I do. The news broadcast production control room sequence, where we watch the footage being sent nationwide, is absolutely extraordinary. Suddenly we're in a room full of strangers, reacting to this stream of images that everyone is seeing for the first time together. The mood shifts. An NBC news presenter played by Courtney Grace offers live commentary, her stunned and emotional reactions accompanying the montage of audience reactions we watch unfold. And I realized Spielberg had orchestrated a beautiful moment of shared global viewership and unity that I hadn't felt in decades. I knew it was fictional, but it hit me so hard.
Yes, there's a lot about the movie that doesn't make logical sense. And it's unapologetically hokey and bright-eyed, and don't think that I didn't notice the cutesy "Snow White" references paralleling the "Pinocchio" ones from "Close Encounters." But I had a Spielberg moment with this film, a real taste of cinematic wonder for the first time in I don't know how long. And my head says the movie fundamentally doesn't work and is a terrible slog, and my heart says that the last fifteen minutes was still worth it.
---
