In a recent interview, Steven Spielberg said that if anyone deserves to have a close encounter with aliens, it’s him. Who, after all, has done more to prompt interest in extraterrestrial visitors with big-screen movies that lend a magical aura to the notion that Earth already has hosted interplanetary guests? For me, Close Encounters of the Third Kind leads Spielberg's alien-picture pack.
But Spielberg is not a philosopher or, as far as I know, a geek who’s in love with astrophysics; he’s an entertainer and storyteller who operates in the old Hollywood tradition, using his considerable prowess to serve up gripping narratives that have mass appeal. At his best, Spielberg delivers pop-cultural implants that can buoy fatigued spirits.
This brings us to Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s latest foray into alien visitation, this one brimming with a message that aliens — seen but not freshly imagined — are healers who come to Earth to spread a conciliatory message.
The movie tells us that the human capacity for empathy has more to do with evolutionary progress than brute force. We've forgotten how to listen to one another, to feel one another's sorrows. Precisely why alien life forms would want to offer their help to beleaguered earthlings remains unclear.
There’s little point in arguing against Spielberg’s case, advanced with obviousness in David Koepp's screenplay. But Disclosure Day is more than a lecture; it's a scattered collection of intrigue-laden bits that sing a familiar song: A corporate/military cabal tries to stifle individuals who want to spread the truth about alien visitations. They've been happening since the last century and maybe even before that -- or so the movie says.
It’s instructive to note that I’m writing more about Spielberg than about the characters in Disclosure Day. That may be because, aside from Emily Blunt’s portrayal of an aspiring TV journalist who feels stuck in a weather person’s job — the characters tend to be the kind of archetypal figures a schematic story needs.
The list includes the scowling corporate boss (Colin Firth) of Wardex, the company that insists humanity must be protected from knowledge of alien visitors lest chaos erupt. Math whiz Danny (Josh O’Connor) defects from
Wardex, having realized that knowledge about aliens belongs to everyone.
Tag-along characters include Danny's girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), a former novitiate who left convent life. Jane thinks Danny must be stopped because the truth might undermine faith in God, thus rendering life meaningless for believers. Jane conveniently presents an opportunity for Spielberg to accomplish a feat that has eluded others; the melding of science and faith.
Faith puts man in the center of God’s gaze on Earth, but who’s to say that that gaze isn’t wider than the faithful presume? Put another way, maybe God made ET, too.
The faults in Disclosure Day are not with the film’s making, but with a screenplay that’s bound to ideas expressed with a heavy hand and which tamp down the movie's sense of mystery.
Sometimes, the film seems to rehash familiar Spielberg tropes. Blunt’s Margaret and O’Connor’s Daniel are deeply influenced by signature events from their youths, childhood in Margaret’s case. They've been touched (or perhaps selected) by aliens as possible carriers of the messages. Both Danny and Margaret are being driven by forces they don't understand, but which they feel compelled to follow, shades of the character Richard Dreyfuss played in Close Encounters.
Early in Margaret’s hectic Kansas City life as a weather forecaster, a cardinal flies through the window of the loft she shares with her partner (Wyatt Russell ). Margaret’s capabilities are transformed. She can speak languages she never studied. Equally important, she can enter the minds of strangers, grasping their feelings with uncanny accuracy.
A scene in which Margaret applies her new skills when pulled over by a cop brilliantly brings the matter to life. Delivering dialogue at breakneck speed, Blunt makes the whole business credible. Margaret's abilities go public during a TV broadcast in which she begins speaking in strange clicks. Her colleagues think she's lost it. We take it as a sign that she’s channeling an alien language.
The movie’s design features a hand-held alien device Wardex has snagged; it allows people to appear in different places at the same time and to penetrate and manipulate others. Never mind how it works; it also can turn on power when generators are shut down, a universal remote of sorts.
The dangers of unwanted intrusions are obvious, which partly explains why Wardex renegade Hugo (Colman Domingo) has organized a clandestine opposition to the company and why Danny made off with evidence of horrible abuse of aliens and other solid proofs that of earthly alien existence. Humanity has been deceived.
Hugo and his team even reconstruct Margaret's childhood home so that she can reconnect with a signature event in her childhood, cloaking the whole business with a bit of pop psychology, something about returning home before being able to move forward.
Spielberg’s magic touch can be felt sporadically, but too much of Disclosure Day functions as a sci-fi procedural that espouses lofty ideas about how humanity might save itself from conflict, one of which simmers in the background as tensions between the US and Russia mount.
Don't get the wrong impression. Disclosure is far from awful. It's just not up to Spielberg's best. Spielberg’s undeniable skills are well displayed. Blunt’s performance has a distinctive edge. And, if nothing else, skeptics can giggle quietly, if by the end, they haven't been convinced to take the whole business seriously.
So, yes, greatness eludes Disclosure, and for all its supposed weighty themes, the best thing about it involves a mismatched battle between a red car and a speeding train. We're talking down-to-earth action that makes the pulse pound in ways the movie's headier aspects don't. Spielberg’s skill at concocting this action wowed me more than the movie's benevolent aliens.
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