So far, so Spielberg – he sets the stage for an ambitious, epic, action-heavy story about agroup of do-gooders facing off against asinister corporation. But Koepp’s screenplay simply isn’t up to the task; tonally uneven with athinly-sketched religious subplot, the stilted dialogue gives the impression of awriter who’s never heard humans have aconversation before, much less written countless films to that effect. Spielberg’s boyish earnestness clashes with amostly humourless script, resulting in adistracting goofiness (on more than one occasion characters evade capture by hiding behind alarge physical obstacle like it’s an episode of Scooby-Doo) that undercuts the narrative tension.
Wilful withholding of information results only in confusion and plot holes so big they have their own field of orbit; even acast as dramatically able as this one can’t lift the leaden script, with Firth reduced to agrimacing caricature of avillain and Blunt flitting around like abee trapped inside ahot living room. O’Connor, always so magnetic on screen, suffers from aone-note character he struggles to imbue with life – his romantic plot with Hewson’s joyless former nun only serves to add afrustrating, unconvincing hurdle.
Disclosure Day isn’t without fleeting moments of wonder – the few interactions between humans and aliens chief among them – but it’s impossible to extract this film from the wider canon of Spielberg, upon which so much has been built. Spielberg revealed that his interest in alien life was reignited by a2017 New York Times article about the Pentagon’s mysterious ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’, and this ultimately led him to the idea that Koepp expanded into Disclosure Day. Yet there’s little of that DNA in the finished product; the tantalising question of whether humanity has the capacity to treat an alien species as anything other than athreat remains just out of reach as the film focuses instead on the fairly uninteresting tug-of-war to keep the secret in the firstplace.
A bad script could be forgiven if Disclosure Day was atriumph on acraft level, but even this falls short with frequent Spielberg collaborators as lacklustre as Koepp. Janusz Kamiński returns for his twenty-first Spielberg picture – so many of their collaborations presented distinct visual identities which elegantly captured asense of time, place and emotion, winning Kamiński two Academy Awards for Cinematography in the process. Disclosure Day’s prevailing mood is ‘vague gloom‘ with adistinct lack of memorable shots, while John Williams’ score (described as “subtle” by Spielberg) reflects the film’s uninspired execution. Even the VFX work is shoddy, with Polar Express-level CGI animals taking the audience out of what are supposed to be the film’s core emotional moments.
None of this gives me any joy to report. Few were as excited about the prospect of anew Spielberg alien film as Iwas, and what hurts the most is the distinct feeling that this could have been atrue conclusion to acareer-long narrative. Close Encounters, E.T and War of the Worlds all manage to articulate something about the human condition and how we relate not only to each other but to the world around us; Disclosure Day gestures vaguely at similar territory, but never lands on solid ground. It might be acase of Spielberg hampered by his own back catalogue, but it’s also hard to not see the film as curiously out-of-touch with the present despite the contemporary setting.
The handful of truly great alien films we’ve witnessed in the last 15years, notably Arrival, Nope (also Universal!), Under the Skin and Super 8 (which Spielberg produced), only serve to underline how unfortunate this feels. All these films are indebted to Spielberg’s groundwork at some level might as well not exist for all the interest Disclosure Day has in expanding or building upon them. This is afilm not in dialogue with the cultural reality or cultural potential of aliens, refusing to mesh with the contemporary world on apolitical or cultural level, but also clearly not meant as aretro throwback. Emerging blinking into the foyer after Disclosure Day, one isn’t confronted with asense of wonder or curiosity, but instead of abject confusion at the incoherence of Koepp’s script and lack of technical ambition on Spielberg’s end. Perhaps this is the film’s real truth: never underestimate mankind’s capacity for disappointment.