I will admit that, as I’ve gotten older, my rabid thirst for All Movies, All the Time as abated somewhat, simply due to Life and the natural diversification of interests n such. Once upon a time, I would’ve killed to see ANY Steven Spielberg title on the Big Screen, even if just from a completist point of view.
However, in the last decade, a few of his recent endeavours have passed me by, with titles like Lincoln (2012) and The Fabelmans (2022) awaiting my attention. West Side Story (2021) can go fuck itself (sorry, Steven!)…as I LOATHE musicals, I don’t care who’s in the director’s chair. A big part of why these titles were skipped, aside from Life getting in the way, was simply subject matter and mood. A grand-scale docu-drama and a whimsical autobiographical yarn about his upbringing require just the right circumstances for me to say ‘Yeah, throw it on!’.
Simply haven’t encountered those circumstances yet.
However, one subject you toss Spielberg’s name on that’ll have me come a runnin is motherfuckin aliens!
Hell yeah, baby!
Scattered throughout the man’s incredible filmography are those familiar extraterrestrial tales Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. The Extra-terrestrial (1982) and, of course, his 2005 adaptation of HG Wells classic novel War of the Worlds, all of which are great in their own ways…so when I found out he was dipping his toes back into the well of ‘hard’ science fiction, with a “spiritual sequel” to CEot3K, I was instantly curious.
Just not curious enough to get my lazy ass to the local movie theatre, it pains me to admit.
Luckily, these terrible dark days we find ourselves living in now also offer up REALLY quick home media / streaming options, so when I found out the Blu ray was literally being released ‘a week later’, I put in a blind Pre-order, comfortable with taking that chance as, for the most part, anything with The Beard’s name attached is welcome in the Blu ray library…except for YOU, 1941 (1977). You, and West Side Story, can just fuck off and die somewhere. Just sayin.
In short order, my Blu ray arrived…on the day it was released to the home video market (I love it when that happens).
Disclosure Day opens with fugitive cybersecurity expert ‘Daniel Kellner’ (Josh O’Connor) barely escaping a trap set by a ruthless shadowy operative named ‘Noah Scanlon’, who is determined to secure the slew of classified information and technology that ‘Kellner’ has willingly stolen from the agency they both work for. At the same time, a bubbly Kansas City ‘weather girl’ named ‘Margaret Fairchild’ is abruptly stricken with strange abilities after an encounter with a strange bird, resulting in a steady unravelling of her life and sense of self as she tries to figure out what’s happening to her. Eventually, ‘Margaret’ and ‘Daniel’ cross paths, revealing a strange connection they have to an event they both experienced as children…and the chase is on.
So, as soon as the wrapping was torn asunder and the disc was tossed in, I scooped up my pad and pen…and hit PLAY.
Scribbles were then unleashed…
-Homage to Highlander? Opening scene. When I was a kid, I was low-key obsessed with 1986’s original Highlander flick, so the wrestling arena opening is still stuck somewhere in my mind and was immediately dredged to the forefront as Disclosure Day opens mid wrestling match, the first opening shot being us, the audience, getting literally stomped on in POV (a shot I never would’ve expected from Spielberg, to be honest), before we move through the action and the crowd to find one of our main characters, cybersecurity expert ‘Daniel Kellner’ (Josh O’Connor) hidden among the masses.
-Looks gorgeous already. Some classic Spielberg compositions. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that a Steven Spielberg flick is going to look good, even despite some of my complaints of past muddy lighting and color-drained compositions. Here, it seems as though complaints of that ilk regarding past titles has resonated with the man, as this one feels closer to his film pre-20 years ago, with more colors and lighting that ‘pop’ than I’ve seen in a good while.
-The intrigue continues. Blunt’s gradual unravelling good. Languages. We are introduced to ‘Margaret Fairchild’ (Emily Blunt), a weather girl for a Kansas news network who’s going through her life with her boyfriend ‘Jackson’ (Wyatt Russell) when a chance encounter with a small, oddly behaving bird triggers something in ‘Margaret’s mind, prompting strange lapses into other languages, languages that she normally has no skill with. Added to which, she’s also showing signs of possible psychic abilities, with no explanation as to why. I thought the way Spielberg and Blunt presented the growing intrigue to be quite effective.
-Shades of Enemy of the State. I approve. Shadowy government agents tracking and pursuing our main characters using only the most sophisticated of technology, not all of it human either. I always appreciate a solid ‘chase’ movie (the late Tony Scott’s excellent Enemy of the State is a personal favorite) and this one shapes up to be one of those in no time flat.
-No winning with CG animals. Even with the deepest of pockets, the tech STILL isn’t there to present fully photo-realistic animals out of 1’s and 0’s, and here is no different. We, the audience, can always tell.
-Wyatt’s disgusted look hilarious. At one point, something sets ‘Jackson’ off and the look of disgust on his face when he turns around to confront the issue literally had me laughing out loud.
-Nixon was an idiot?!! No way!! As more and more of the secret information is revealed, one of the ‘documents’ turns out to be a video file of footage shot in 1973 of then President Richard Nixon showing off what appears to be dead alien bodies to a random comedic movie personality, for no other reason than to impress. Nixon was a stupid asshole…and what’s shown here falls right into some dumb shit that crook would’ve probably done, showing off national security secrets just to impress some celebrity.
Hmmm…now that I ponder it, that does sound like something a certain piece of shit someone in modern American politics would so (or has done, as some evidence suggests).
-Relevant ‘science vs religion’ debate. It seems like this is an argument that’ll never get fully put to bed, it grieves me to acknowledge. Stupid humans and their stupid cults and superstitions!
-Funny ‘kill the phone’ scene. One element of these types of ‘characters tracked by nefarious government agency’ stories is the eventual disposal of personal, trackable devices. Disclosure Day is no different, only here, the scene is used for a much-needed moment of levity, as ‘Margaret’ and ‘Jackson’ labor to dispose of her cell phone using their car, only to continue missing every time they try to drive over it. I actually laughed out loud.
-Hints of Minority Report. Suspect tracking. In what felt like a throwback to one of his own flicks, Spielberg does a new version of ‘scrubbing the image’, as Colin Firth’s sinister ‘Noah’ character uses a form of alien tech to try tracking ‘Margaret’ and parts of it reminded me of that 2002 sci-fi flick’s crime tracking technology.
-Spielberg playing with drones? There are two major chase scenes and both of them felt as though Spielberg opted to try out drones, instead of cranes, tracks and camera cars, as much of the footage felt ‘swoopy’ in the way that drone footage often can. It wasn’t over-the-top, like the recent drone work Michael Bay (The Rock) went with for his last couple flicks, but I did notice it, when mentally comparing the action onscreen to similar past examples in Spielberg’s filmography.
-Spielberg + car chase = always good! As noted in the previous scribble, Spielberg gifts us with a couple of high-octane chase scenes and I was reminded that, going as far back as 1971’s Duel, The Beard has ALWAYS had a deft skill when it comes to putting us in the middle of one of his kinetic and innovative car chase scenes, and Disclosure Day was no different.
-Wyatt Russell is Teri Garr. Those who understand this reference are clearly fans of Spielberg’s 1977 alien-visitation classic and spiritual prequel Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind, in which Teri Garr played the oddly antagonistic and misunderstanding wife to Richard Dreyfuss’s beleaguered ‘Roy Neary’ character. Here, it’s Wyatt Russell’s ‘Jackson’, the initially sympathetic but abruptly intolerant boyfriend to ‘Margaret’, who checks out of the situation partway through in a way that seemed somewhat at odds with his initial sympathies to the situation. And then…he all but vanishes from the story.
-NOBODY circled the building? Idiotic goons. At one point, a group of armed operatives converge on a small motel where ‘Kellner’ and his girlfriend ‘Jane’ (Eve Hewson) have holed up but they only do so after approaching the building from just one direction, allowing ‘Jane’ to scuttle off into the night out a bathroom window around back. Had the goons been even half-way competent, there would’ve been at least one waiting to simply catch her as she jumped down. But nope…off she goes.
-Knowing stuff helps! Convenient…but fun. One byproduct of ‘Margaret’s mysterious new-found psychic abilities is being able to instantly delve into life details of virtually anyone she meets, which allows her to waltz straight into a highly secured facility unopposed in order to try and rescue the recently re-captured ‘Kellner’.
-Blunt gets solid F-bomb. Being a PG-13 flick, they’re allowed one, non-sexual ‘Fuck’ and it goes to Emily Blunt, who uses it hilariously during a mild freak out.
-And…see ya! Train vs sedan. The second major chase scene has ‘Margaret’ and ‘Kellner’s escape car being forcefully pushed toward the side of a passing train by one of the head goons. Normally, there would be some narrow escape but not here. Here, the goon succeeds and the front end of the car is smashed and grabbed by the train…and off they go…at mind-numbing speed!
-Awesome train sequence. Old school Spielberg. More classic chase scene goodness.
-OK, good scene. Blunt losing her shit. After they barely escape with their lives, ‘Kellner’ and ‘Margaret’ pause to catch their breath in a boxcar, during which ‘Margaret’ has something akin to a nervous breakdown, which I though Emily Blunt handled magnificently.
-Clever use of fire trucks. Everyone moves for emergency vehicles (or they should), so the idea of having the clandestine opposition to the nefarious government agency using fire trucks to swoop in and save our heroes was a pretty good one.
-“I will not be anyone’s religion!” Good line. This one just stood out to me.
-Glamoured! Invisibility hijinks ensue! The mysterious captured technology provides our main characters with the ability to ‘glamour’ the opposition and in this case, render themselves invisible to the antagonists in a way that led to several comedic moments involving solid objects unseen.
-MacGuffin powers convenient. No power? No problem! Several times, the alien tech that the characters are playing with provide easy solutions to difficult situations…which is certainly convenient, from a screenwriting perspective.
-Where the fuck is Wyatt Russell?! Aside from a super quick insert reaction shot of him in the 3rd Act, Kurt Russell’s kid is just…gone.
-Roswell footage. Kinda eerie. Footage of alien bodies being recovered plays out like something out of a horror movie…where humans are the monsters.
-Damn! EVERYONE with a screen. Fucking zombies, we are! There’s an incredibly telling sequence in Act 3 which depicts crowds of people in various locations reacting to the machinations of the finale and it’s nothing but faces aglow in the light of countless cell phone screens…much like our largely pathetic state out here in Real Life.
-George Burns?! There is a character reveal at the tail-end of the flick and the non-human focal point of that reveal had me instantly thinking of old-school comedian / actor George Burns. All that was missing was the cigar.
-Yeah…ok. THAT ending. Not sure that artsy ambiguity was fully earned. Ideally, I don’t want to ruin it for those who haven’t caught it yet, but one of the biggest complaints I’d read about Disclosure Day prior to actually seeing it was the ending. Now I see why. And I’m not even sure I can chalk it up to being a subjective take…as I’m simply inclined to think that all that had come before it was simply not enough to justify THIS level of admittedly frustrating open-endedness. And I’ll be honest…I felt that this ending was actually below Spielberg’s abilities as a long-established story teller. But it is what it is.
All in all, I think that Disclosure Day is solidly Second Tier Spielberg…and that’s not a bad thing, per say. In the man’s extensively accomplished library of movies, there are the absolute classics that we all know and love, if not through direct contact, then through their influence on pop culture as a whole.
Then, there are the ones that I’ve come to refer to as Second or ‘B’ Tier Spielberg, like War Horse (2011), Bridge of Spies (2015), The Post (2017), and The BFG (2016), to name a few. These flicks are genuinely well-crafted, with all of them demonstrating some degree of Spielberg cinematic genius at some point in their various run-times but, for some reason, the overall viewing experiences on initial release did not hit that way the old-school blockbusters did. They’re all solid when you watch them, at times even great, but when the credits roll, very little resonates by even the next day. It feels almost wrong to be levelling those charges at a Steven Spielberg film but hey…here we are.
Disclosure Day falls into this category for me. It’s well-put together, with Spielberg dipping back into some of his old action-blockbuster bags of tricks, along with a noticeable improvement in lighting and picture quality, as compared to many of his flicks from the last two decades, many of which are stricken with that grey’d out, under-saturated, over-blown look having become a somewhat unfortunate visual calling card of his over the last twenty or so years.
The cast is expectedly solid, with Emily Blunt in particular having several moments to shine as the beleaguered weather girl caught in the largest major conspiracy the world has ever known. Those around her all showed up and did their jobs, with Colin Firth chewing at the scenery with a certain degree of unhinged calmness that I thought made him a bit more interesting than his admittedly one-dimensional villain was written to be.
The largest complaint I’m left with centres on the story itself, namely that ending, and some of the plot holes, like Wyatt Russell’s character disappearance. The core idea is fascinating and exciting, but I did find that some of the overall satisfaction I’d had up that point in the 2 hour and 25 minute run-time was dashed away by a finale that simply didn’t feel earned, in the cliff-hangerish, ambiguously artsy ending they opted to go with. Normally, I love that kind of finale, but here, it felt like there were still too many unprovided answers to elicit the approval from the audience of what amounts to an open ending.
Overall Summary – Disclosure Day is good, entertaining even…but not great.
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