Yet the film is at its best when the director stops showing off the craft and a boundless energy that eludes men a third his age and instead pivots to the more magnanimous view of humanity, and for that matter aliens, which has evolved in the filmmaker’s later years. If Disclosure Day is a coda on the man in the beard’s fixation with unexplained lights in the sky, it is also a reclamation for the Larrys of the world; a wide-eyed, awe-inspired gaze into a future where no one gets left behind and the truth is shared with all. Human and extraterrestrial alike.
To get to that kind of graceful epiphany, however, Disclosure Day spends a lot of time running through some standard blockbuster storytelling, or at least what was the standard 20 years ago when Spielberg and other filmmakers were still making zippy escapism for adults. Two such grown-ups are Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) and Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor). To the outside world, and even to the characters, these are two folks who should have little in common. Margaret is a professionally stifled weatherwoman at a local TV station in Kansas City who wants more out of her life; Daniel works for WARDEX, a government-adjacent agency that for the last 50 or so years has coordinated UAP research and cover-ups for the Department of Defense.
Yet Margaret and Daniel’s paths are inextricably linked after Dan goes the full Edward Snowden route and steals reams of classified documentation, files, and even video evidence that prove aliens are real, they’ve been visiting us for longer than there’s been a U.S. government, and we know where some of the literal bodies are buried because our leaders put them there. He even gets his hand on something that’s only cryptically referred to as… The Device.
Curiously, the moment Daniel and his mentor, an aloof but immediately endearing Colman Domingo, get the information out of government control is the moment that Margaret starts getting visions of repressed childhood memories and discovers she somehow can speak all languages and knows everything that can and will happen to Daniel—especially as WARDEX boogeyman Noah Scanlan (Colin Firth) begins closing in with his men in black. Noah isn’t without sympathy, but it has stark limits when he resorts to threatening (or worse) Daniel’s girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson).
Longtime Spielberg collaborator and screenwriter David Koepp recently confirmed to me that the final scene of Disclosure Day is the first sequence Spielberg wrote. It is also one of the things that was left largely untouched after Koepp and Spielberg began reworking the director’s treatment. This shows in the final film. Without giving away what the finale of Disclosure Day exactly is, rest assured it features some massive secrets which allow Spielberg to return to the cinematic vernacular of 1970s cinema, both his own with his penchant for characters staring up in bewildered, wondrous close-up, as well as some of his contemporaries like Sidney Lumet and Alan J. Pakula.
It’s pure Spielbergian magic. The movie that gets to those final moments is a lot more checkered, although not without its charms and entertainment.
