There is an iconic moment in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg’s 1977 classic, where a little boy opens a door to reveal a great beam of light emanating from an alien ship. It is the reverse of the classic Spielberg shot where we usually see a character’s face as they look in wonder at something off-camera. Here we see the boy welcoming the wonder in, but still all we see is that beautiful beam of light. Spielberg has made a career out of inviting the wonder in.
Buy Disclosure DayIn some ways, Disclosure Day makes for a good bookend to Close Encounters. Both films are about alien encounters (Disclosure Day marks the fifth film from the director about aliens) and the intense effect this has on their characters. Close Encounters was made by a young man full of hope and wonder. Disclosure Day was made by a much older man who has seen the realities of the world and is currently living through difficult times.
In Close Encounters, we follow a few characters who have been touched by an alien encounter and are compelled to go to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming to meet them again. The government is there, and they’ve taken measures to keep average citizens away, but they too are in awe of what they find. They long to communicate with the aliens, to create a relationship with them. In Disclosure Day, the aliens reached Earth a long time ago, and the government has done everything in its power to keep the knowledge of such things completely secret.
Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is a tech whiz and math guru working as a cybersecurity analyst for the Wardex Corporation, the private security firm the United States government has hired to keep all their alien knowledge secret. The film gives some offhanded reason they’d allow a second party to protect their most secret of secrets. Still, it seems a deliberate message from Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp about the state of our current government. Anyway, Kellner has had enough; he and a few other Wardex folks have decided that this information belongs to the world and should no longer be kept secret.
We meet him after he’s already stolen several hard drives’ worth of videos showing all human interaction with the aliens (we are not the good guys in these videos, which show us experimenting and torturing the aliens so we can figure out their tech to make weapons). Wardex is run by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), who uses some alien crystal thingies to telepathically locate Kellner’s girlfriend, Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), and capture her. She used to be a nun, which leads to some ponderings on how the religious world will react when they realize we are not alone in this universe. Spielberg’s films have often brought big ideas about religion and spirituality to his films, but he usually lets the audience grapple with the questions he’s asking here; it is more like a blunt object bludgeoning us with them.
Jane is useful for a while, but once we meet our other hero, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), she basically disappears. Margaret is a TV meteorologist for a Kansas City station. If you watched any of the trailers, then you know she’s going through some weird stuff. Suddenly, she can speak Russian. While doing a live report, she starts speaking in an alien tongue, which alerts the Wardex people to her.
The first two-thirds of the film is mostly Wardex chasing Kellner and Margaret (at first separately, and then together). I loved most of this. Spielberg is a master at this stuff. His set pieces are thrilling. He knows how to move his camera, and he’s incredible at blocking. There is an amazing scene where a train smashes into the car our heroes are driving, and it drags it along at high speed while the bad guy shoots at them. But he also knows when to slow things down. Right after that chase scene, Margaret and Kellner are seen inside the train, surrounded by pianos being transported somewhere. Margaret has a panic attack, and Kellner gets to comfort her. It is a nice human moment after this spectacular bit of action (and a terrific bit of acting by Blunt, who is wonderful throughout, giving the film some much-needed grounding).
Eventually we get to the part where they share the knowledge of aliens with the world, and this is where the film loses me. There is a bit of philosophical nonsense, but mostly Spielberg seems to think that modern audiences would stop and gasp at alien videos. He has the whole world literally stopping to watch, when we all know most people would scroll right past it or call it fake news. This feels more like science fiction than the actual aliens.
My brother is a big alien-conspiracy-theory nerd, and he was disappointed with the film. He says the alien community believes that Spielberg has real connections to the people hiding all the knowledge about aliens, and this was supposed to be the film where he let us know what’s up (all coded, of course, so only the chosen few would be able to decipher it). Apparently, they are all up in arms over this film, which definitely doesn’t give them what they wanted.
I’m not an alien nerd, but I do geek out over Spielberg. This film mostly gave me what I wanted. This isn’t Spielberg at the height of his powers. Disclosure Day is not Close Encounters of the Third Kind or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. That sense of wonder those films give the audience isn’t completely lost, but it does feel a bit worn down, beaten by age and the times we live in. But if you are open to it, you can still invite it in and be overwhelmed by the joy of cinema.
Universal Studios presents Disclosure Day with a beautiful-looking UHD transfer. It comes with a 4K UHD disc, a Blu-ray, and a code for a digital copy. Extras include the following:
- Encountering the Unknown: Inside Disclosure Day – Steven Spielberg, Emily Blunt, and the rest of the cast uncover the filmmaking secrets and real-life inspirations behind the movie
- Spielberg and Williams: A Legendary Collaboration
- Trailers
- Optional English SDH, Spanish, and French subtitles for the main feature
