An Alien Says What?

Full disclosure (no pun intended), I have not been interested in watching Disclosure Day, the new Steven Spielberg film about aliens that came out just a little while ago. That is largely because the trailers didn’t make the film look at all interesting. The trailers tried to pitch some kind of mystery box story about aliens somehow communicating through a couple of people, to bring some kind of message about something… maybe God… to humanity. In a word, it looked awful, so I fully expected to not watch this film in theaters, or even maybe at all. While I will see most things, I don’t feel the need to watch everything, especially when trailers for a film look bad.

However, my podcasting partner, Ghoul Mike, specifically asked if we could cover the film on the ‘cast. The intent was to watch Masters of the Universe next, but that film left my local theaters within a couple of days of arrival, and was soon replaced by this movie, so Disclosure Day it was. So I went into the theater, trying as hard as I could to keep an open mind while Spielberg’s new alien opus played out on screen.

In fairness, Spielberg has had a lot of success with alien stories. Three of his biggest films feature aliens prominently: E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and War of the Worlds. Of course, one of his worst films also features aliens as a key plot point: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That one is also Spielberg’s most recent alien film, so you have to wonder: is that where his head is at, or can he tell good stories about aliens. If Disclosure Day is anything to go by, Spielberg probably needs to avoid alien films for the rest of his directing career.

The film is an utter mess. It opens with Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), who is being blackmailed by some shady governmental agency into handing over a backpack full of stuff. The agency, which we eventually learn is a private firm called Wardex, has Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), keeping her hostage in exchange for the stuff he took. But he has a secret alien device he smuggled out of Wardex, and he uses that to ward off the bad guys, led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), and he escapes with Jane and the stuff he took, leaving them with their dicks in their hands.

I have to be honest: this was probably the worst way to introduce this movie. You go in knowing almost nothing about Daniel from the trailers, and this opening sequence is so overwrought I honestly thought it was a movie-in-a-movie sequence. At some point the director would call “cut”, everyone would break character, and we’d realize this whole alien intro was a joke and we’d get into the real movie sometime after. Except it wasn’t a joke, it was just poorly written, poorly directed, and very badly directed. If you want people to get sucked into your movie, this intro is the worst way to do it.

Once Daniel and Jane go on the run, hiding out from Wardex while they try to get to a man named Hugo (Colman Domingo), we then get introduced to Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a weather person with KCEX News out of Kansas City. While talking with her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), a cardinal flies into their kitchen. This somehow awakens something in her and she starts speaking other languages. More interesting, though, is that she can make eye contact with someone and know their whole life. What they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, everything. She confused and scared but she knows one thing: she has to drive East and find Daniel. Somehow, together, they can get to the center of this mystery and figure out what’s really going on.

And, again, we run into an issue because Morgan is a terrible character. Blunt is a fantastic actress, make no mistake, but what she’s given is a character who waffles between constantly acting freaked out and then, like a switch, suddenly being a knowing goddess who doesn’t have to explain anything at all. There’s a lot riding on her character, she’s the anchor of this whole film, but the movie doesn’t give you anything about her to invest in. She’s both everything about this film and also a shallow character with no development. The film needs more.

But then, hell, the film needs a lot more on all aspects. Disclosure Day is very much an “and then” story. Our heroes get somewhere, and then the bad guys so up. They get somewhere else and then the film screeches to a halt to explain stuff at us before the bad guys show up again. Round and round they go, running and explaining and running again, but very rarely does anything feel like it has consequences because we end up running again to the next plot point with little reason beyond running is all this film has.

It certainly doesn’t help that the film is so obvious in its plotting, and so linear in its narrative, that you can guess just about everything that’s going to happen just as soon as the film really starts up. Two people chased across the country by bad guys is only going to go one way: towards the inevitable “disclosure day”, especially since that’s also in the title. We’re stuck on a path, with shallow heroes and even more empty villains, all with obvious objectives and one destination clearly in mind. If anything about this film surprises you, I have to think you’ve never watched a movie before at all.

And all of this is for a message that, what, God loves all his creatures, including those from other worlds? And because of that we also should really just try to be nice to each other? That was what I gleaned from the film (and I don’t feel like it’s a spoiler because that was practically said in the trailers, too). The film feels like it’s grasping for relevancy, but its message is so cloying and simple that you keep expecting something more relevant to be said. I don’t know what ideas Spielberg was working through with this film, but Disclosure Day tries to say a ton without really saying anything at all.

It sucks because if you ignore the story, there are the bones of a really good production here. The script, written by David Koepp, is terrible but Spielberg absolutely turns it into a very good looking, very well shot narrative. Bad acting aside (and there’s tons of it throughout the film), Spielberg knows his way around pacing, setting, and action. There are lovely, long, one-shot scenes with the camera moving and twirling around characters. There are great action set pieces with movement that sucks you in. There are moments that remind you that, yes, Spielberg is one of the greatest directors still working today. You just have to wonder why the hell he’d make a movie otherwise this terrible.

What did he see in this script that didn’t make it to the film cut? Or was it that he felt he had to change the script around to suit his purposes? Whatever the case, the end result is one of the best looking, worst films I think I’ve ever seen. That old Spielberg magic is almost here, right up until the characters open their mouths and the plot has to play itself out. If you can just sit back and watch the action you might enjoy Disclosure Day for a little while. But then the film speaks up and everything about it is ruined.