Spielberg has lost the plot
Steven Spielberg has a long-standing flair for interspersing fun films with serious ones: for every Jurassic Park, a Schindler's List, and so on. His latest – a conspiracy thriller in which Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor try to blow the lid off a 70-year-old UFO cover-up – is a rare attempt to pull off those two modes at once, and regrettably ends up bungling both. The result feels oddly empty and, for all its surface-level convolutions, derivative, too: like Men in Black without the jokes.
It is shot and staged with Spielberg's signature elegance: a central foot-to-car-to-train chase moves with such breathless lucidity it is as if the director is beaming excitement directly into your brain. But the plotting surrounding the action is often woolly and lopsided, while the tone is an awkward mix of solemnity and silliness. One moment, Colin Firth and Colman Domingo are soberly debating the nature of human agency; the next, a bad guy is tripping over an invisible sofa.
Colin Firth's Noah Scanlon runs the shadowy agency Wardex, which is trying to retrieve evidence of extraterrestrial life that has been stolen - Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment
The premise, conceived by Spielberg and turned into a screenplay by David Koepp, exhumes a number of pulpy ideas from the first two thirds of the director's back catalogue – elements of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, War of the Worlds and Minority Report – which it then filters through the greyer, graver world-view of Munich, Bridge of Spies and The Fabelmans. Earth is on the brink of a Third World War, though O'Connor's cybersecurity buff, Daniel Kellner, has bigger things on his mind.
He has pinched classified videos that prove the existence of extraterrestrial life from Wardex, a shadowy agency run by Firth's Noah Scanlon, whose goons are trying to retrieve them before they find a wider audience. Instrumental to this plan – for reasons that are initially mysterious – is Blunt's Margaret Fairchild, a weather presenter on a local news network.
Josh O'Connor plays cybersecurity whistle-blower Daniel Kellner, who has stolen the Wardex videos - Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment
Margaret, who hasn't a clue what's going on, finds herself being guided towards Daniel by some unknown force; Daniel and his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), make their way towards Hugo Wakefield (Domingo), a former Wardex employee, for reasons Daniel is unwilling to share.
Side by side, these two plots all but defy you to care about what is happening: one character has no idea what she's doing or why, while the other refuses to say. Nor does it help that all parties have intermittent access to an extraterrestrial artefact – a granite Smarties tube Blunt amusingly refers to as "the thingy" – that seems to allow the wielder to do pretty much anything, from psychic bilocation (a favourite of Firth's) to mind control. The sense that our heroes and villain could will almost anything to happen brings on an unfortunate shrivelling of emotional stakes.
With its ruminations on everything from responsible government to humanity's innate religious drive, Disclosure Day is unquestionably a big swing. But with Spielberg, big swings should be a given, and this one only glancingly connects.
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