Disclosure Day: Spielberg’s tense alien conspiracy thriller is derailed by sentimental detours

As if anticipating Steven Spielberg’s new alien-truths conspiracy thriller, the Pentagon recently released decades-worth of UFO-sighting videos, audio tapes and reports. Unhelpfully, the public proved underwhelmed and sceptical about the blurry orbs, blips and light swarms on offer, which suggests that Disclosure Day’s fierce, sustaining belief that UFO proof-of-existence will explode the global order, might be a bit previous. Spielberg’s earnest, big-ideas-driven chase thriller, in which Josh O’Connor’s Edward Snowden-style whistleblower Daniel is hunted mercilessly by Colin Firth’s Wardex defence corporation, is the ‘sci-fi summation’ of his uniquely fruitful 50-year obsession with UFOs and dystopian big tech. A film that draws on the wonder of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. The Extra-terrestrial (1982), and also the tech-vs-humanity tensions of A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Minority Report (2002), it’s a fascinating medley of Spielberg’s core themes, but one which can only fitfully fashion them into a satisfying whole. 

But there’s much that is thrilling here. The film bangs open sharply with Daniel ineptly springing himself, his kidnapped girlfriend Jane and his backpack of secrets from capture by Wardex’s paramilitary thugs, catapulting the pair into a set of frantic cat-and-mouse, cross-country chases. Scarily, Noah (Colin Firth, in ‘ruthless headmaster’ mode) can track and exert mind control on Jane (Eve Hewson) by using an alien device. Her intense, self-harming attempt to eject him from her mind is Spielberg at his best, an ordinary person tackling the extraordinary head-on. In an engaging contrast, the plot running alongside this has gentle comic charm and a popping succession of surprises with the sudden eruption of telepathy and polyglot skills in TV weather girl Margaret (a delightful, ditsy-to-determined Emily Blunt) culminating in her involuntary production of clicking alien speech on-camera. David Koepp’s highly efficient script deftly fuses these two-story strands (one relentlessly tense, one disarmingly playful) so that fugitives Daniel and Margaret, brought together by ex-Wardex UFO truther Hugo (Colman Domingo), can add her eerie powers to his data-freeing mission.  

But the film will insist on alternating its taut, masterly action sequences with baggy, sentimental excursions into the mysterious childhood trauma that Daniel and Margaret share, another Spielberg obsession. A heart-in-mouth battle that sees their car dragged by a cargo train into the path of an oncoming locomotive is wrenchingly realistic and affecting. But a Disneyfied sequence of ‘closure’ that Hugo gives them, full of surprisingly shonky CGI animals and familiar John Williams music cues, stalls the plot as it strains for (but misses) the mystery and wonder that E.T. had in spades. The same can be said of the film’s occasional, left-field excursions into ex-nun Jane’s ontological fears about whether proof of alien existence will displace God in man’s hierarchy, which require a Mother Superior’s expert analysis. Still, all this tracks with Spielberg’s tender, long-established preference for examining how aliens make earthlings feel, and their effect on human relationships, rather than what the aliens themselves might reveal.  

There’s two-thirds of a fine movie here, and it’s never less than a joy to look at, Janusz Kaminski’s gloriously fluid, lens-flared 35mm camera work delivering action sequences and the rapt ‘Spielberg gaze’ with equal facility. Though the characters (with the exception of Blunt’s Margaret) aren’t complex, Hewson and O’Connor give subtle, deeply felt portrayals, and Firth’s drily menacing Noah finds vulnerable patches in his villainy. Blunt has a ball however, sliding Margaret seamlessly through the bewilderment, enjoyment, terror, and sudden certainty that her journey brings her. Snapping tearfully “I don’t want to be anyone’s religion”, she conveys the lonely, giddying fear of her transformation. Handily, we also learn that gender stereotyping appears to be a galaxy-wide issue, as Margaret’s uncannily soothing empathy and Daniel’s dazzling maths skills emerge as key alien gifts. 

As their mission and the film’s uneven final act barrels to its climax (heightened by the faint and unnervingly topical background build-up of World War Three), one feels the lack of the awe and spectacle that Close Encounters or AI attained with their glimpses of the unknown. This is a film about aliens, but one whose revelations are determinedly human, its quest a data dump of historic information that might change how mankind sees itself. Network TV, that increasingly ignored communal medium in our world of online bubbles, is the old-fashioned conduit the film chooses as an empathy machine, the portal to our better selves. Would knowing ‘we are not alone’ dissolve human tribalism? Could we even accept it, in the AI-age of fake news? Spielberg’s resolutely spiritual view of this cosmic concept fervently wants us to believe so.  

► Disclosure Day is in UK cinemas 11 June.