‘Disclosure Day’ Review: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor and Colin Firth Lead Steven Spielberg’s Spellbinding Return to What He Does Best

It’s been a long time since Steven Spielberg directed a film as quintessentially Spielbergian as Disclosure Day, which contemplates how humankind might react to proof that extraterrestrial life exists. Some might make the case that 2005’s brawny alien apocalypse action thriller War of the Worlds fits the bill. But for those of us who grew up on the director’s classics, foundational Spielberg usually means Jaws for terror, Raiders of the Lost Ark for retro-styled adventure and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. for the sheer sense of wonder evoked by a universe that radically expands our world.

In terms of grand-scale event movies that imagined new frontiers, Jurassic Park might sneak into that core group. But the 1993 prehistory-meets-futuristic technology thriller was already edging into darker territory as dazzling scientific innovation collided with corporate greed, hubris and industrial sabotage, and awe made way for fear.

For many of us, movies of the 1970s and ‘80s cemented our love for the medium, and formative experiences don’t get much more wide-eyed, captivating and, if you will, pure than canonical Spielberg. Few if any other contemporary directors have harnessed the capacity of movies to astound and transfix us in quite the same way vintage Spielberg does, in part because despite his storytelling mastery, he’s as much a goofy kid as the rest of us (something spelled out in The Fabelmans), staring slack-jawed in amazement at big-screen spectacle.

Spielberg is partly working in that vein with Disclosure Day, and shared DNA can easily be traced to Close Encounters and E.T. But as is fitting for a filmmaker pushing 80, awestruck innocence now co-exists with a more ruminative maturity, especially when touching on the secrecy, manipulation and deception of governmental power. As much as Spielberg’s early sci-fi, the new film kept taking me back to the moral and philosophical questions posed by 2002’s brilliant Minority Report.

The two movies also share a febrile energy, exacting command of visceral chase sequences and superbly choreographed action set-pieces. But the heart of the film, as with all the best Spielberg work, is the human drama, channeled in deeply felt performances from Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor, with Colin Firth effectively playing against type as the villain of the piece, albeit one who chooses to believe he is acting in the country’s best interests.

There are allegories that can be read about fear of the unknown breeding cruelty and exploitation, but Disclosure Day is first and foremost a propulsive yarn with thematic roots in hope, truth, empathy and perhaps even spirituality.

Spielberg has always been a populist filmmaker but the extent to which he and screenwriter David Koepp put the audience to work piecing together the puzzle is invigorating. 

We are thrown into the story without preamble, after a government shadow agency called WARDEX, headed by Firth’s Noah Scanlon, has kidnapped Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson) as a means of getting to her slippery boyfriend Daniel Kellner (O’Connor). Kellner is a former WARDEX tech whiz hired right out of the prison parking lot on his release day after serving eight years for cyber crimes. The division houses secret evidence of UAPs and nonhuman visitations to Earth dating back to the Nixon administration.

Now accused of treason, Daniel has stolen a powerful device of alien origin that the division paid him to protect. He believes people have a right to know about the five-decade cover-up and plans to release classified WARDEX data and video files.

Spielberg keeps us guessing what’s going on by opening at a wrestling match, a crowded place Daniel has chosen to make the exchange, trading the device for the return of Jane. But the cloak-and-dagger operation doesn’t go as Scanlon planned. Daniel goes on the run with Jane and the device, setting the movie’s vigorous pursuit engine in motion. 

Daniel’s chief ally is WARDEX Director of Biological Assets Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who went underground along with a dozen employees and now shares the same goal. Daniel protests that he has zero experience as a field agent, but Hugo insists he hold onto the device and hope that they reach him before Scanlon does.

Meanwhile, Margaret Fairchild (Blunt), a Kansas City TV news meteorologist whose boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) is resistant to her desire to move to a bigger market, experiences sudden changes. After a red cardinal flies into their apartment and lands on the kitchen table, Margaret is mysteriously able to speak Russian and Korean, and get inside the head of anyone she encounters, just using eye contact. While on air about to do her usual perky weather forecast, she spaces out and starts making strange clicking sounds, a language that is gibberish to everyone except Daniel, who instantly recognizes it as code.

Urged by a call from Hugo to destroy her phone and flee Kansas City fast, before WARDEX can get to her, Margaret also hits the road, accompanied initially by a bewildered Jackson. The connection between Margaret and Daniel and its origin form the central mystery of Koepp’s screenplay, which was developed from a story by Spielberg. The ways in which these two ostensible strangers know each other and the separate functions they have in understanding an alien species give the film its emotionally affecting charge.

Spielberg is clearly nodding back to Close Encounters, even going so far as making the extraterrestrials resemble the visitors from that ageless 1977 classic, while the covert agency hell-bent on containing the information leak recalls E.T. But it’s important to note the distinction that this is neither of those landmark films. 

The plethora of sophisticated sci-fi in the past half-century means pretty much every alien lifeform or spacecraft that moviemakers can dream up has been seen — which is not to say production designer Adam Stockhausen’s work on the latter isn’t impressive. Inevitably, it’s just much harder to surprise us now.

For almost the entire film, our view of the interplanetary visitors is confined to low-resolution, black-and-white video from the ‘70s on monitor banks, previously locked away in the WARDEX vaults. But for this audience member at least, that limited exposure served to foreground the human stakes — especially once Scanlon starts using an identical device to the one in Daniel’s possession to get inside the heads of people close to the fugitives able to disclose their whereabouts.

While the combination of editor Sarah Broshar’s relentless pacing and John Williams’ full-bodied score (which stands among the veteran composer’s finest) makes for an exciting watch throughout, the breathless action sequences are especially thrilling. Notable among them is a high-speed chase in which Margaret and Daniel jump from a car to a moving train as Scanlon’s vicious head of security Boyd (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) pursues and tries to kill them.

The cast could not be better. Hewson’s Jane, a former novitiate nun who lost her vocation, is both a moral compass and a threat once Scanlon gets to her with his mind-control methods; she serves as a conduit for the film’s questions about faith and humanity’s need to believe in something beyond our existence. The always excellent Elizabeth Marvel projects wisdom and warmth as a caring nun at the monastery where Jane once lived, her open-mindedness toward cosmic forces that transcend religion conveyed with crisp economy.

Domingo — the movies’ equivalent of bacon or chocolate in that he makes everything better — portrays Hugo as the most clear-eyed and level-headed yet unexpectedly tender of the characters, guiding Margaret and Daniel toward a deeper understanding of their pasts, as well as what they are experiencing in the present. Russell has a more limited role but nicely straddles the divide between supporting Margaret and believing she’s crazy.

Firth is chilling, pushing his stern, fiercely intelligent demeanor in increasingly sinister directions and bringing nuance and gravity to the lengths Scanlon will go to fulfill his mandate, whatever the cost. WARDEX’s success at reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology feeds into the movie’s undercurrent of ‘70s-style paranoia and nefarious conspiracy.

O’Connor is one of our most soulful and sensate actors, seemingly incapable of a false note; he brings conviction and a depth of feeling to Daniel that intensifies with each new piece of information concerning who he is and where his abilities originate. A sequence in which he narrowly avoids being apprehended while at an isolated farmhouse in rural West Virginia with Jane is another expertly staged nail-biter.

The standout, however, is Blunt, simply breathtaking and never more magnetic, injecting a whirlwind of emotions into Margaret as she’s hurtled forward by terrifying instincts that she’s powerless to control, and making steady gains in purposeful determination as her situation — past and present — is illuminated. The final act that takes Margaret back to where she started is profoundly moving, even if the steps Koepp takes to get there can at times be fuzzy. 

The idea that aliens can present themselves to humans as familiar animal species is arguably the only instance in which Spielberg gets borderline cheesy, not least because it’s the film’s most distracting CG element. And the backdrop of worldwide unrest and escalating nuclear threat is subtle to a fault, though that’s just nitpicking.

In terms of craftsmanship, Spielberg is in peak form. Working with his longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who is painting here in a muted color palette pierced by beautiful lighting, the director blocks every shot for maximum dramatic impact, the camera moving with a grace and control that reaffirm his reputation as a consummate visual storyteller. For anyone who has loved his movies, Disclosure Day will be an essential addition to Spielberg’s rich body of work.

Original Article on Hollywood Reporter