…Ready For It?

My thoughts on Disclosure Day

Although I bow to no one in my belief that Steven Spielberg is more than deserving in his place at the top of the cinematic pantheon, I must confess to finding his work over the last quarter-century somewhat on the uneven side. I admire both his consistent work ethic and his continued willingness to try new things at a point in his career when he might normally be expected to simply offer variations of his greatest hits—the one-two punch of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report, the underrated likes of Bridge of Spies and The Post and his ambitious reworking of West Side Story serving as the big standouts in that regard. One of my key problems is that when he has gone back and expressly tried to recreate the feel of those early blockbusters that helped to cement his legacy—films like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.—he has shown himself able to recreate the mechanics but not the magic, leading to film ranging from disappointments like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and War of the Worlds to flat-out atrocities like The BFG, The Adventures of TinTin and, god help us all, Ready Player One.

Therefore, I confess to having more than a few hesitations regarding the prospects of his latest epic, Disclosure Day, which, even in the few scraps of information that have seeped out over the past few months, suggested another attempt to evoke the glories of his past. That turns out to be true, more or less, but it only took a few minutes for those hesitations to disappear and be replaced with wide-eyed delight at what I was seeing. Unlike those previous attempts to reconnect with his past, this one is not only his most completely, compulsively entertaining and engrossing film to come along in a while, it is one deserving of comparisons to those earlier classics as Spielberg demonstrates that his considerable gift for cinematic storytelling is still as sharply honed as ever.

While I am sure that there will be plenty of reviews out there that will cheerfully reveal and dissect every single plot point, I will try to be as circumspect as possible in regards to details, though anyone wanting to go in completely fresh should probably set this piece aside until later. It does indeed deal with the notion that we are not alone in the universe and the possibilities of what might occur if our paths did indeed cross, the basic premise that drove the likes of Close Encounters, E.T., War of the Worlds and Crystal Skull. The conceit of the screenplay by David Koepp, working from a story conceived by Spielberg himself, boils down to one basic question: What if everything that we think we know about the possibility of encounters with alien intelligence on Earth over the last 79 years—Roswell, alien autopsies, probings, crop circles—was not just the inspiration for decades of conjuncture and conspiracy theories but all true?

Here, the premise is that all of this has happened and a top-secret private defense contractor, currently led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), has been charged with keeping all of it hushed up by any and all means necessary, ostensibly due to fears that the world (which is already currently on the edge due to a rapidly escalating conflict with North Korea) is simply not ready for such potentially destabilizing news, though he and his group are also keen to utilize and replicate the astounding alien technology that they have acquired along the way. However, a group of former employees, led by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), feel differently and have quietly broken away with the plan to at last reveal all of this information to the world using purloined data and technology as their proof before Scanlon and his men can find and stop them.

Deeply involved in all of this is Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who was behind the theft and is now carrying around all the information and narrowly avoiding capture at seemingly every turn while desperately waiting to be brought in by Wakefield’s group. Along for the ride is Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), Daniel’s girlfriend who had no idea about who he was working for or what he was planning on doing but is nevertheless drawn into the conflict as well. To be fair, she has a few secrets as well, primarily the fact that she was a former novitiate who left the church because of doubts about her faith and Daniel’s revelation to her about what is happening, while on the run, shakes her even further, especially when Scanlon figures out a particularly diabolical way of using her to get to Daniel. Meanwhile, in a seemingly unconnected storyline, Kansas City weather reporter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) has an odd encounter with a cardinal one morning while having breakfast with her slacker boyfriend (Wyatt Russell) that precipitates a lot of weirdness on her part—she begins speaking in languages she claims not to know, she seems to know intimate details about the lives of random people that she encounters on the way to work and, when she goes on air, she only delivers a series of strange clacking noises before collapsing. She also begins receiving strange impulses that inspire her to escape from the hospital and go on a search for Daniel, who is someone that she does not know in the slightest but who she is compelled to seek out in the hopes of getting answers to what is going on.

In a number of ways, Disclosure Day feels like a remix of Close Encounters, another film that dealt with alien entities, government coverups and ordinary people who find themselves inexplicably caught up in the middle and determined to get answers. Another point of comparison is that both films try to juggle feelings of paranoia and mistrust regarding the government’s clumsy efforts to try to keep information from getting out with a more positive and optimistic take on what the aliens may want from us—there may be orgies of destruction on display throughout but they are all 100% man-made. And yet, while there are undeniable similarities between the two films, Disclosure Day never feels like a retread, mostly because Spielberg’s approach to the entire notion of contact with aliens has clearly shifted over the years. Instead of giving us an insular story of a couple people trying to have their questions answered, he genuinely and wholeheartedly sees the notion of the possibility of extraterrestrial life to be perhaps the last real hope for humanity—the one thing with the potential to cut through everything from world conflicts to political tensions to an increasingly fragmented media landscape and bring us all together as one—and manages to keep firmly fixated on that idea despite all the chaos going on in the attempts to bring that moment to humanity.

Spielberg and Koepp take a chance by almost literally starting the film in mid-chase and then filling in viewers on the particulars of what is happening along the way. This is a risk for a couple of reasons—it runs the risk of confusing viewers right off the bat and it suggests that large amounts of explanation and exposition will be required at some point to eventually bring them up to speed. However, Spielberg is, of course, a master at visual storytelling and between his still-undiminished talents in that regard and his faith in a contemporary audience’s ability to pick things up and put them together, the narrative manages to move along without a hiccup—he presents everything in such a way that they can pretty much understand everything, even if viewers do not specifically know every single detail of the convoluted narrative that they have been dropped into or even how they manage to know them. When the explanations begin in earnest, things admittedly get a bit lumpier but Koepp’s screenplay gets through these moments without allowing things to get too bogged down.

That is largely because Disclosure Day is a throwback to the grand summer popcorn entertainments that made Spielberg’s name as a filmmakers in the first place, one where every element on display is working in a well-oiled manner without ever giving viewers the sense that they have seen it all before. Spielberg is obviously a master of large-scale chase/action scenes and even though there are a number of them on display here, you never get the sense that he is simply ransacking his old bag of tricks and indeed, a couple of them—particularly one involving a car and a couple of trains—are as impressive as anything that he has attempted in his career. All of his collaborators, most of whom he has worked with in the past, turn in top-notch work (the score from John Williams is particularly impressive) and keep things moving along at a headlong pace that leaves viewers exhilarated rather than exhausted, which is particularly impressive since it clocks in at nearly 2 1/2 hours. The performances all around are completely engrossing—O’Connor and Blunt are both fascinating as they play ostensibly ordinary people who find themselves enmeshed in extraordinary circumstances and while Hewson has become a reasonably familiar face on the screen in recent years but this may finally prove to be her big breakthrough. Amidst all the chaos, they supply a convincing human center that keeps the film from simply becoming a technical exercise and as a result, when Spielberg goes for the big emotional climax, it works because he and the story have earned it.

Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of discourse, as it were, about the massive successes of Obsession and Backrooms, two films made by young men who started out doing things on YouTube instead of going the typical film school route, and what this means for the future of Hollywood. As someone who likes the idea of filmmakers coming out of nowhere to beat the studios at their own game, hated the films in question and dreads the onslaught of crap that will be coming along in the next couple of years from people trying to repeat that phenomenon, I am somewhat pessimistic as to where things are going to go in the future. Now comes Spielberg, who was himself the industry boy wonder once upon a time, and while he couldn’t have possibly foreseen the impact of those films, he has made one that almost serves as a rejoinder to them to say that the old guard still has things to say and are not content to simply rest on their laurels. Will younger audiences who did not grow up with Spielberg’s films respond to Disclosure Day in the way that their parents may have responded to the likes of Jaws or E.T.? I dunno but if you did grow up with those films, my guess is that you will be feeling the same rush of excitement watching it unfold as you did back in the day.