Spielberg Shows His Hand

Steven Spielberg has spent nearly fifty years pointing at the sky and refusing to tell us exactly what's up there. Close Encounters of the Third Kind ended at the moment of contact and then cut away, trusting that the withholding was the point. Disclosure Day, which I flagged back when it was only an announced return to UFOs, premiered in Paris on June 2 and opens in American theatres on June 12, and it takes the opposite bet. This time the evidence isn't hidden. It's dumped on all eight billion of us at once.

The premise is the most interesting thing about the film, and possibly its trap. Spielberg told CBS News that the story imagines "what would happen if they decided to do a data dump across the entire world all at once," with a shadowy faction trying to stop the release. He's called it a bookend to Close Encounters, and he isn't shy about why the subject still grips him: "I absolutely think that they have been here, and they are here." Whatever you make of that as a worldview, it gives the movie a conviction that a lot of effects-driven spectacle lacks.

Emily Blunt anchors it as Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City weathercaster who starts the film as an ordinary professional and then, after a CGI cardinal flies into her apartment, begins speaking in languages she's never learned and receiving classified information out of the air. Josh O'Connor plays the cybersecurity expert carrying the proof; Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Colman Domingo fill out a cast that, on paper, has no business being this deep for a chase movie. David Koepp wrote the screenplay, Janusz Kamiński shot it, and John Williams scored it, so the craft pedigree is exactly what you'd expect from an Amblin production at a reported $115 million.

I'm writing the day before wide release, off the festival premiere and the critics who caught preview screenings, so this is a read on the film and its reception rather than a seat-in-the-theatre verdict. The early split is the interesting part, more telling than any single rave or pan.

The enthusiasts are loud. The first social-media reactions, collected by The Hollywood Reporter, ran to "Spielberg's best film in 20 years" and "a dense roller coaster ride blending chase film, love story, and mystery." Blunt, talking to Empire, made the Close Encounters connection explicit: "There are definitely questions posed by Close Encounters that are answered in Disclosure Day." That line is either a thrill or a warning, depending on how much you believe those questions were better left open.

Den of Geek landed in the warm middle at 3.5 out of 5, framing the film as a coda to a lifetime of alien movies and a king returning to his throne. Their critic's point is worth sitting with: this isn't the ecstatic awe of Close Encounters, the sweetness of E.T., or the dread of War of the Worlds. It's something older and calmer, a storyteller circling back to his favourite question with the equanimity of someone who no longer needs to dazzle you to make it land.

Then there's the cold end, and it's pointed. The Los Angeles Times critic Amy Nicholson wrote that the aliens are here but the wonderment isn't, and her diagnosis cuts to exactly the bet I opened with. The film, she says, "speeds around frantically, talking constantly and explaining little," where Close Encounters was "a popcorn masterpiece of withheld information." That's the risk baked into the whole concept. If your subject is total disclosure, you've thrown away the very thing that made the 1977 film hum, which was the ache of not knowing.

I lean toward thinking Nicholson has found the real fault line, even if she's harder on the movie than I'd probably be. Mystery is cheap to evoke and expensive to pay off. Spielberg built his reputation partly on never quite paying it off, on the shark you don't see and the light behind the mountain. A film whose entire engine is the release of proof is structurally committed to showing you everything, and showing everything tends to shrink it. Rolling Stone's David Fear caught the same doubleness from a friendlier angle, calling it a kind of career retrospective in miniature, full of traces of Duel and Minority Report, not top-tier Spielberg but more than enough of his presence to warrant the ticket.

The timing is its own character. The film arrives into a real-world disclosure movement, the Pentagon dribbling out declassified reports and grainy footage of things nobody will name, and Spielberg has clearly read the room. A movie premised on a government hoarding eighty years of proof doesn't have to work hard to feel plausible right now. That tailwind probably helps the box office and complicates the art, because it's easier to make a conspiracy thriller land when half the audience already suspects the conspiracy is real.

Disclosure Day lands, a day out, somewhere short of the best-in-twenty-years raves and well clear of the LA Times' near-dismissal: a confident, well-made film that explains a little too much, the work of a director with nothing left to prove and one last thing he wants to say about the sky. I'll see it this weekend, and my bet is the warm, qualified middle, which is no bad place for a fifth alien movie to land.

Sources:

Disclosure Day — Wikipedia

Steven Spielberg on aliens: "I absolutely think that they have been here" — CBS News

'Disclosure Day' First Reactions — The Hollywood Reporter

Disclosure Day Review: Spielberg's Coda to a Lifetime of Alien Movies — Den of Geek

'Disclosure Day' review: Spielberg returns to alien life a little lifelessly — Los Angeles Times

Disclosure Day: Aliens Are Among Us. Just Ask Steven Spielberg — Rolling Stone