Disclosure Day review: Spielberg is back in all his '80s sci-fi glory

Steven Spielberg channels his youthful self in every kind of way

Disclosure Day isn’t just a Steven Spielberg movie — it's that kind of Spielberg movie. Heading into it, I personally was expecting a War of the Worlds-type feel. I really like that movie, but it’s more of a straightforward action-thriller, without the idealistic elements seen in works like E.T. Instead, Disclosure Day not only hooked me with its thriller aspect, but it made me feel a bit more sentimental as well, like the Spielberg movies I watched when I was a kid.

In Disclosure Day, cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) steals information from the corporation Wardex detailing a nearly 80-year-old government conspiracy to cover up the existence of alien visitations on Earth. Throughout the movie, Kellner is on the run from agents trying to retrieve what he stole, while he is guided by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), a former member of the conspiracy who is now the leading advocate for disclosing information about aliens to the general public. Meanwhile, Kansas City meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) also ends up on the run from the conspirators after she unknowingly transmits a message in an alien language over the airwaves.

Spielberg is no stranger to considering extraterrestrial life, having directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. at the start of his career, followed by War of the Worlds and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in his later years. Disclosure Day is the perfect vehicle to bring back the more classic, 1980s vibe. Though to be clear, I’m kind of pushing out the margins of what I mean by 1980s Spielberg. To me, that kind of movie begins with Close Encounters and extends a bit into the early 1990s to at least include Jurassic Park. Both before and after that run, Spielberg made wonderful movies, but they aren’t driven by wonder and the unknown, lit with beams of light that feel like dreams. And while he’s occasionally dipped back into some of those feelings since then, Disclosure Day is his closest-ever reproduction of that vibe, albeit with the pulse of Minority Report.

Disclosure Day is mostly a chase movie, with both Daniel and Margaret pursued by Wardex agents who want to recover the information before they go public with it. Early in the movie, they’re on separate paths, with Kellner hiding out in a monastery and later a safe house set up by Hugo. Margaret, however, is driven by more mysterious forces that eventually lead her to Daniel. The on-the-run-from-the-government story harkens back to the chase elements in E.T., but it also manages to combine some elements of Close Encounters’ otherworldly pull. In that movie, Richard Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary isn’t on the run. He goes to Devil’s Tower because he feels like he’s brought there by some supernatural force. Disclosure Day manages to merge these two feelings and even adds in a bit of Indiana Jones-like train-hopping action.

The story is also underlined by the idea that this information should not be privileged. It belongs to the world, hence the reason for disclosure altogether. It’s an idea that anyone with an interest in aliens and UFOs (or anyone who watched The X-Files) can get behind.

In a way, the straightforward nature of the bad guys in the movie — led by Colin Firth as Wardex head Noah Scanlon — feels like the unambiguous villains in the Indiana Jones movies. They’re not complex and there’s little focus on their motivations outside of their general desire to preserve world order. If anything, they’re less nuanced than the government figures in Close Encounters and E.T. In the former, the government isn’t really bad at all. In E.T., while Elliott perceives the government as the bad guys (and they are intrusive), there’s an effort to show that they also want to save E.T. In Disclosure Day, the bad guys seem a bit more simple, which perhaps suggests a shift in Spielberg’s thoughts around government working in the public’s best interest.

Besides the tight chase story, the other element to bring about that Spielbergian feel is the spectacle and that child-like sense of wonder. And as he did back in the 1980s, those feelings usually come from the same place. In Jurassic Park, it comes from the earlier encounters with dinosaurs like the Brachiosaur and the Triceratops. In Disclosure Day, Spielberg makes use of ordinary animals doing some not-so-ordinary things to evoke the same feeling. And much like how E.T. and Close Encounters wait until the end to give you that epic sense of grandeur, Disclosure Day does that as well, though to explain more than that would give it away.

The only real element missing from this movie that was a key part of those films is some new piece of filmmaking technology we’ve never seen before, like the flying bike scene in E.T. In the age of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Dune, Avatar, and the newer Planet of the Apes films, there’s nothing in Disclosure Day that makes you go “How’d he do that?”

But the thoughtful use of existing tech still feels “big” if not “new.” Combined with an adventurous storyline in pursuit of an idealistic goal, that brings Disclosure Day remarkably close to the S-tier of crowd-pleasing Spielberg movies.

---

Disclosure Day releases in theaters on June 12.