Steven Spielberg’s ambitious sci-fi thriller dazzles the eye while burying its story beneath layers of conspiracy and exposition.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
A partial summing up of the career of its legendary director and credited story writer, Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” is an impressively produced, shot, acted, and directed mess. All of the elements are there, except for a clear, coherent story, and, like Spielberg’s similarly flawed but greater and more groundbreaking science-fiction landmark “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), “Disclosure Day,” which is another first-contact-with-aliens yarn, is a bit loony. At two hours and 25 minutes, it is also too long, and like “Close Encounters,” which Spielberg co-wrote with Hal Barwood and Jerry Belson, the longer “Disclosure Day” goes on, the loonier it gets.
But the new film, which resembles an elongated episode of “The X-Files,” presents us with a vast conspiracy by the U.S. government and other dark forces that have kept the truth about alien life from the world since 1947. Since then, the government and its vaguely Orwellian partners have cleaned up crash sites, captured, yes, E.T.’s and incarcerated creatures from outer space and even vivisected them. They have also captured alien technology and developed it for their own use. One of these, coffin-shaped, hand-held and known only as “the device,” plays a lamentable, large role in the story.
Out of the blue, TV weather gal and wannabe reporter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), who works at a Kansas City, Mo., TV station, starts to emit clicking noises on camera instead of words and then collapses to the studio floor in front of her colleagues. Before that, a cardinal had visited her and her live-in boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell in a thankless role), in their flat, and she had begun to speak Russian fluently and could read Jackson’s mind. What Margaret does not know is that Dr. Daniel Kellner (Englishman Josh O’Connor) is on the run from a mysterious corporation he worked for, Wardex, and its menacing chief, Noah Scanlon (Englishman Colin Firth). Daniel understood Margaret’s clicks and knows that he and Margaret share some strange, powerful bond. Daniel carries a knapsack full of evidence, this film’s MacGuffin, and he is on the run with his girlfriend, a former novitiate named Jane (a very likable Eve Hewson). Daniel receives instructions from another ex-Wardex rebel, Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), on where to go and how to evade Wardex and Scanlon, who has a team. Soon, Daniel and Margaret are on the run from Wardex together, while Jane has been clumsily left behind. Meanwhile, Armageddon beckons as some nuclear-level world crisis is reaching its boiling point. Fans of “Close Encounters” will recognize many story elements.
Including “Disclosure Day,” screenwriter David Koepp has written five films for Spielberg: “Jurassic Park,” “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” “The War of the Worlds” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” Koepp writes big, mostly adapted science-fiction stories filled with chases and big, intricate action set pieces often recalling the work of silent-film master Buster Keaton.
But too many black vehicles arrive suddenly and circle the location where our heroes are sheltering. Koepp’s dialogue is replete with space-filling speculation and exposition. The idea that the world would not be able to “handle the truth” about aliens is dubious, if not rubbish. At its worst, and especially when the film and characters in it suggest aliens are divinities, “Disclosure Day” is surprisingly dumb. Margaret’s mentions a traumatic event she experienced when she was 10 years old and has suppressed throughout her life. Well, Margaret, the truth is out there, as they say.
Working once again with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and composer John Williams, whose partnership with Spielberg began in 1974, Spielberg has created a film that is beautiful to watch and listen to. But there are obvious commercial plugs and a weird shout-out to M. Night Shyamalan when a wheat field in which Kellner stands appears to flatten itself into crop circles. The idea that people would see something on their phones and just assume that it is real is ludicrous. Spielberg evokes Hitchcockian manhunts, especially from the classic “North by Northwest” (1959), and while “Disclosure Day” features a really exciting stunt involving a black Dodge Charger and a train, the film cannot, unlike Margaret, morph into one of our late, lamented loved ones or return us to our childhoods. Note to Spielberg: Some of us were happy to leave childhood behind.
‘Disclosure Day’
Rating: PG-13 for violence, bloody images, profanity
Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colman Domingo
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: David Koepp, Spielberg
Running Time: 2 hours, 25 minutes
Where to Watch: In Theaters
Grade: B
Boston Movie News 