How much a person likes Disclosure Day, the newest film from director Steven Spielberg, depends a lot on what their favorite film of his is. From the raw, thrumming energy of Jurassic Park, Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark, to the throwback sentimentality of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, back around to the calculated emotional devastation of Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg has managed to craft more all-time classics than would seem possible for one man to execute in a lifetime.
I’ve spent my entire life chasing the feeling I got from watching Jurassic Park for the first time at 13 years old. That sense of wonder, combined with that feeling of being transported out of my body and onto Isla Nublar while being chased by hungry, pissed-off dinosaurs, is probably the most direct connection I can make to why I have dedicated so much of my life to writing about movies.
So to say that I looked forward to Disclosure Day is a massive understatement. If I had my druthers, I would make New Spielberg Movie Day a national holiday for all who celebrate, and while I know he’s not the most high-brow or “elevated” filmmaker, outside of Martin Scorsese I’m not sure if there’s any filmmaker still working to whom the art form of motion pictures owes a larger debt.
Does Disclosure Day live up to that hype? Not really, but it’s a film that will age beautifully when divorced from expectations. I went in only knowing that Josh O’Connor plays a whistle-blower with evidence of extraterrestrials and Emily Blunt plays a reporter who makes contact with the aliens on live TV. Moviegoers should not find out any more than that about the plot. Letting the story unfold at its own pace is one of the joys of the film, even as David Koepp’s script makes some genuinely bizarre storytelling choices.
Anyone who goes into Disclosure Day looking for Spielberg’s return to pulse-pounding popcorn cinema along the lines of the desperate terror of War of the Worlds or the paranoid sweatiness of Minority Report should recalibrate those expectations. His newest is much more of a wide-eyed, hopeful transmission to the cosmos like Close Encounters or E.T. This is Spielberg at his most “I want to believe,” and it’s lovely to see.
Thematically, Disclosure Day works beautifully, as we have a wide swath of characters all desperate for understanding. Whether it’s a math genius hoping to decode the universe, an unsatisfied woman trying to figure out her place in the world, a government official haunted by the loss of his wife or an ex-novitiate trying to reconcile her faith with her cynicism toward humanity, these characters all possess deep inner lives worth building a film around.
The problem lies with Koepp’s script. It sidelines characters for large chunks of screen time, takes trips down narrative dead ends and can’t seem to reconcile whether he wants the film to be a goofy, warm-hearted adventure along the lines of E.T. or a deeply earnest look up to the skies like Close Encounters. Koepp remains one of the most profoundly inconsistent screenwriters in history. He’s responsible for not only my beloved Jurassic Park, but also for the hugely disappointing new movie with Scarlett Johansson.
Because Spielberg is such a master of pacing and tone, the movie still has momentary triumphs over its flailing script. We’re left with one of Emily Blunt’s finest performances and a genuinely optimistic view of the universe that I think humanity really needs at this point in history.
More than a soulless popcorn blockbuster, Disclosure Day feels like a deeply personal attempt for Spielberg to reconcile his religious faith with his belief in other life, his ever-shifting feelings toward mankind and our universal right to truth. He isn’t just asking if we’re alone; he’s taking aim at the modern landscape of calculated misinformation, government cynicism and our collective starvation for transparency.
Yet, as the runtime clocks past the two-hour mark, a distinct friction begins to form between the film’s towering thematic ambitions and its mechanical plot execution. It exists as a film that is both too conceptually vast and too narratively undercooked. Spielberg crafts a film that literally begs us to rediscover our empathy, but does so in service to a script that doesn’t quite understand what makes humanity worth saving in the first place.
Despite the narrative conveniences and the script’s structural faults, the director’s visual alchemy remains unmatched at times. Several moments of transportive beauty here hushed the theater and pulled the audience completely to the edge of its seats. It may not rank in the top tier of his legendary filmography a few decades from now, but a middling, deeply human Spielberg film is still more vital than what almost anyone else is producing today. It proves that even when the map is flawed, the man behind the camera hasn’t lost his true north.
‘Disclosure Day’ (2 hrs, 25 mins) is currently playing at True West Film Center and other local theaters.
