Review: Disclosure Day is big on action, light on ideas

The summer blockbuster season has kicked off in earnest with the theatrical release of Disclosure Day, director Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated return to his “aliens are among us” sci-fi roots. Verdict: there’s not much fresh or original here as movies about aliens go, but it’s a fast-paced film with a luminous performance by Emily Blunt that won’t fail to entertain.

(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)

The first half of the film is essentially a political thriller—shades of 1974’s The Parallax View and similar films—as global tensions have the world teetering on the brink of World War III. A cybersecurity specialist named Daniel (Josh O’Connor) has stolen a piece of alien technology and highly classified files from his employer, Wardex Corporation, a top-secret extension of the US government led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). Scanlon flushes out Daniel by holding his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) hostage. At the tradeoff, Daniel double-crosses them and escapes with Jane, and the two go on the run as Scanlon declares Daniel a traitor.

Meanwhile, Kansas City TV meteorologist Margaret (Emily Blunt) is having breakfast with her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) when a cardinal flies through the window and locks eyes with her before flying away. Margaret resumes her conversation with Jackson, only in Russian—a language she has never learned. On the way to work, she finds she can read the thoughts and feeling of other people, and converse in their native languages. And then—in a pivotal moment featured in all the trailers—Margaret starts her live weather report, only to lapse into an alien language on air. That moment immediately goes viral.

This brings her to Scanlon’s attention, as well as that of Scanlon’s Wardex colleague Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo). Hugo is the one pulling the strings behind the scenes to arrange for Daniel’s theft of the top secret materials. His goal: reveal their contents—detailing human-alien encounters over the last 80 years—to the world. Scanlon is equally intent on stopping the truth from ever getting out, and it becomes a high-stakes race against time as Daniel and Margaret try to evade his minions and find each other.

A vibe shift

I won’t say much about the final 30 minutes or so, because it would be giving too much away (although the final trailer gave some pretty strong hints). Suffice to say there is a pronounced vibe shift toward the mystical as the plot threads converge. In Spielberg’s capable hands, it works, although some have criticized the CGI, particularly for the animals. Given what those animals turn out to represent, I think it was the right decision to make them look otherworldly, as if they were stepping out of a fairly tale into our darker, grittier world.