DISCLOSURE daze: Extra-terrestrial but oddly pedestrian…
Daniel Kellner has a problem. He’s stolen something from his employers: a set of storage devices that contain information that will change the world if revealed. A man named Hugo tells him not to panic, but Daniel’s girlfriend appears to have been kidnapped and it’s clear the people chasing them are happy not to take prisoners… so he decides that panic might indeed be the best response.
Meanwhile, meteorologist Margaret Fairchild is fretting about an audition that could take her from ‘weather-girl’ duties to sitting at the weekend presenters’ desk at the local news station. However, her boyfriend is puzzled when, shortly after seeing a cardinal fly into their apartment, Margaret starts speaking fluent Russian, apparently without even noticing. When, during her broadcast, she starts uttering strange guttural clicking noises before passing out, everyone’s worried, but only one person understood what she was ‘saying’. Daniel.
Can Daniel and Hugo reach Margaret and find out their common link before a man named Noah Scanlen and the private army of Wardex Corporation catches up with her?
And is a world already on the brink ready for the secrets that have been kept under lock and key for decades?
*spoilers*
RELEASE THE FILES (no, not those, the other ones..!)
If Close Encounters of the Third Kind (everyday people feeling summoned to a place to make contact with something greater) was abducted, probed and bore a hybrid entity with The X-Files, (subversive efforts to out-maneuver a government determined to keep secrets under lock and key) then Disclosure Day would likely be the result – a film that attempts to entangle the DNA of both the Spielbergian optimism and sense of wonders of the 1980s with the ‘Trust No-One’ cynicism of the 21st Century.
As some of the earliest reviews reported, all too often, this feels like a jumble of Spielberg’s greatest hits, which would normally be great news…but here it feels diluted down and not fitting together as well as you might have expected given his general throughline themes. In most respects it’s an all-ages film though a younger demographic will likely think it drags. It simply doesn’t have the pacing or scale of a summer blockbuster. In some ways, Disclosure Day feels more like being dropped in to the middle of a pre-existing series – Taken, The X-Files even Fringe or Debris – or a season finale where you’ve missed all the preceding episodes and though you’re interested, you are also constantly playing catch-up… you feel you really should know and care who the characters are from the outset, but they remain tenuous and just out of reach for most of the running time. That’s a deliberate tactic of the film, opening in the middle of things (like the original Highlander, we start at a wrestling tournament and then zooming in to one audience member – Daniel) and then searching to find what makes something or someone important to bigger events.
There’s discussion in the film about the perilous state of the world, a sense that it’s at a tipping point in conflict and the moment of potential ‘disclosure’ comes where it could unite a fractured world (as we and our ‘heroes’ believe) or send it into yet more existential chaos (as Colin Firth and his shadowy private organisation fear). That global situation brings to mind some of the backstory of both The Abyss (Extended Edition) and Watchmen that ask the same question. Unfortunately, Spielberg downplays that element reducing it to background noise and therefore reducing the story to more conventional cat-and-mouse game with the government with requisite set-pieces punctuating a much slower film than expected.
There’s considerable talent on screen but there’s not a single role that doesn’t feel ever so slightly miscast nor story elements that seem fully-formed.
Emily Blunt has talent and range, but though she nails everything she’s asked to do, she’s not really asked to do a lot except look confused, enthralled or annoyed as the scene demands. She convinces as a telepath (or, more accurately, an empath) but there’s only so many ways you can furrow your brow with concern (ask Patrick Stewart about Professor X). There’s an attempt to introduce the trials and tribulations of Margaret’s professional life as a usually bright and breezy weather girl (and her personal life with Wyatt Russell’s Jackson – a guy who has been moving around to support her career aspirations but is getting weary and then concerned) but both sides to that life are pushed off-screen early-on to make way for the main plank of the story.
Josh O’Connor (Fr. Jud Duplenticy in Wake Up Dead Man!) is also fine as Daniel Kellner, the hacker and cyber-expert who is on the run with the files. But, again, the character is a convenient set of awkward quirks, uneasy and paranoid (both with good reason), a person who absolutely believes in the cause but isn’t always sure why. It’s a real pity that his girlfriend Jane (played well by Behind Your Eyes‘ Eve Hewson) doesn’t have more to do after the first half of the film – essentially disappearing and turning up miraculously at the climax – as her nun-turned-fugitive appears far more interesting in the collision of faith and science than the short amount of screen-time and lip-service it gets in the second hour.
Colin Firth’s sinister Noah Scanlon is also given little backstory. Beyond the overt boo-hiss factor, the plot actually gives him some fair motivations and convictions (is he really entirely wrong that ‘we are not alone‘ might not be what everyone wants to hear at a time of global tensions?) but all too often he’s reduced to the monologuing antagonist who is willing to do anything to maintain the status quo. Maybe it’s tied to the loss of his wife, maybe it’s religious, maybe it’s pure pragmatism… nothing fully sticks. Firth can bring the gravitas when he wants, but Disclosure Day gives him little room to play the bigger emotional beats and the ending ultimately doesn’t feel consistent with his character’s actions thus far.
Colman Domingo (talented and currently everywhere) gives his mysterious Hugo Wakefield an intense edge, heading up the mission to get the redacted information out to wider eyes and let people decide for themselves… but it’s a role that could either have been given far more to do on screen or been written out entirely. It seems that he and Scanlon were once best buddies, yet the sense of fracture between their worldview stances amounts to no more than a few lines of dialogue. It’s the sort of evolving element that would have worked better in a mini-series and all these elements all feel like they’d have played out more fully that way.
There’s some problem with internal logic as well, a sense of ‘I wonder why..?‘ rather than the sheer wonder. How did Daniel find any time or reason to have a personal life given his devotion to Hugo’s cause – let alone to a devoted nun-on-the-run? The recordings of decades of extraterrestrial interaction should be huge but are little more than a set of memory-sticks maguffins, for most of the film – waiting for their moment of release – and the amount of time devoted to Hugo and the way he hopes to make Margaret remember previous events seems at odds with the priority of making everyone in the world aware of the truth. Alien devices that allow people to project themselves into others’ minds are a nifty sf device, but again don’t make a huge amount of internal sense. In short, the chase elements feel more manufactured and not as organic as they should – though a car/train interface is well-staged.
And though I’d love to retain Spielbergian optimism in a world that might well benefit from it, the realist in me is not so easily able to buy the denouement, that a contemporary network would consider going to air with what they had (there’s more than an inference that they’re being influenced to get on with it and not ask too many questions) and a AI-savvy modern public would likely be more impressed if the Epstein Files has finally seen daylight rather than aliens (especially given that alien-distraction was recently tried in real life and was received as nothing more than a grainy footnote). The actual ramifications? Well, like A House of Dynamite, it leaves some of the consequences to on-screen revelations to the off-screen imagination…
Is the truth out there? By the end, like The X-Files, you want to believe, but just because this is a ‘greatest hits’ it doesn’t make Disclosure Day Spielberg’s greatest offering – more like a well-intentioned and not-without-merits tribute act that holds the attention but doesn’t hold you much longer than the running time. There’s no singular Spielbergian moment you’ll be endlessly be replaying in your head, nor any echoing ear-worm by the usually uber-reliable John Williams. Rather than setting the pace, this all feels a bit late to the cultural party, less a Close Encounter than a distant fancy where the extra part of the extraterrestrial promise doesn’t quite play out…
7.5/10
Disclosure Day is now on general release from Universal Pictures…