Disclosure Day continues Steven Spielberg's enduring foray into extraterrestrial awe.
However, the latest outing feels too overfamiliar to provoke genuine contemplation.
Emily Blunt tries heroically to squirrel deep emotion out of a patchy screenplay.
In Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg confronts faith and its fragility in an increasingly destabilised word. Does the knowledge of extraterrestrial life reassure or exacerbate mankind's raging anxieties? This kernel implies a sense of solace humanity desperately wants. The temporality in which the film opens suggests global fray. The geopolitical scene is splintered. Nations are on an edge with each other. Trust is in deficit. The loss of faith in change and possibility pervades regular interactions. Amidst dismal times, Spielberg insists on offering hope, reconciliation and empathy as our anchorage. How you perceive this entreaty is proportional to whether you would be disarmed by the sincerity floated here, or see it as starkly phony.
Wardex, a US corporation in cahoots with the government, has guarded intel on extraterrestrial evidence and its mistreatment for years. Wardex is bent on covering its tracks, led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). He’s driven to do whatever it takes to prevent a low-grade Wardex employee, cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor). He has his hands on vital proof that he swears should be made accessible in the public domain. Should the facts be spilled, the corporation would be staring at its swift undoing. There are decades of collusion with the US Defence, misattributed disasters and a slew of lies, ranging back to the Nixon era. It’d be a severe blow to the US military establishment. Hugo (Colman Domingo) is the whistleblower who has learnt these cannot be kept from the public and marshals his own unit to channel the revelation. Daniel is his strongest asset.
Then, there’s Margaret (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City news anchor in charge the weather reports. When a particular bird lands on her apartment’s window, everything shifts. She goes into these spells where she can switch between Korean and Russian, look into the souls of strangers and guide them. Blunt makes a thrilling, tactile, unnerving spectacle of Margaret’s utter disorientation at her newfound powers. Wardex starts hunting her down when she lapses into alien-speak on live news. Margaret and Daniel find themselves scampering for safety while Scanlon’s team threatens to close in. Daniel has a crucial device of alien origin in his possession, which Wardex can’t afford to lose. The cat-and-mouse chase between Wardex and the duo drives some of the exhilarating pursuit sections.
The problem with the film is Spielberg’s devotion to old-school storytelling tropes doesn’t always cohere. There’s a needling reliance on gimmick, a curiously dated innocence about media circulation, while the performances scour for greater resonance than what’s on the page. Emily Blunt's emotionally zesty performance infuses the drama with sentiment. Margaret is the grounding force, reflecting directly what people are battling, hiding. Just eye contact with strangers is enough to touch their secrets, aches and hopes. Through uncanny encounters, she draws them back on course. She's the key to humanity. The screenplay juggles three parallel tracks which ultimately hew together. Eve Hewson too is tremendous as David’s girlfriend, Jane, summoning exacting pain and resolve in scenes with Colin Firth. But the conflicts over her conception of spirituality, her past nun life might be broadly spelled out but never reach a potent, poignant place. There’s vague, thinly developed spiel about “divers”, “experiencers”, all predicated on the alien device that enables leaps from one space to another. It’s a sort of mental mapping that can be misused for extortion and terror. Jane’s relationship with faith and divinity becomes the launchpad for the film's existential enquiries.
Blunt brings such emotional might, a depth of feeling it constantly centres the film amidst the noise and action. She makes it more sombre and moving, cutting down on the bluster and artillery raining on the hectic movement. Yet, the filmmaking is so vividly enthused it tides past the wobblier bits, sketchy characterisation, ample contrivances. There's a profoundly human pulse shivering beneath all the racing and scrambling and intimidation. It's what makes it so animated with emotional stakes even as David Koepp's screenplay frequently goes in circles. The narrative arcs struggle to shake off remnants from the past.
Whether you’ll connect with Disclosure Day is also contingent on your endurance for nostalgia, a certain form of emotional storytelling that moves through conventional beats. It’s loyal to how you anticipate the swell of suspense around the confiscation of the drive, the bungled captures, the ultimate moment of the reveal to which the drama is headed. As much awe and childlike wonder Spielberg pours into the film, it doesn’t deflect entirely the tiringly conventional writing. The gaze on suppressed evidence of alien visitation is too familiar, averting a more nuanced consideration of global unrest that’s just sanded into a generic outline. It’s tough to overlook how the film elides more topical fears regarding the digital age. What’s equally frustrating is the extraterrestrial civilisation remains foggily etched as it would be decades back. Yet, experiencing Disclosure Day is full of contradictions. When Spielberg musters that reaching out for the unknown, few things are as irresistible.
