The summer movie season has suffered a gut punch with Disclosure Day, one of the dopiest, messiest movies that Steven Spielberg has ever made.
He made my all-time-favorite movie, Jaws. But he’s now directed 37 movies (yes, I’m counting his lame kick-the-can segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie), so of course he’s made some clunkers along the way, like Hook, The Terminal, The BFG and a couple of others.
Disclosure Day is now the worst movie he’s ever made.
The film posits itself as a return to the “aliens are among us” heyday of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. Aliens were also part of his excellent adaptation of War of the Worlds and the rather unpopular Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (which I kind of liked despite the silly alien stuff). The problem here is that Disclosure Day is 95% a lame chase movie that hardly has anything to do with aliens.
A woefully miscast Josh O’Connor plays Daniel, a former employee of a nefarious agency that has been protecting secrets about Earth’s possible interactions with aliens, including Roswell, for 80 years. He’s stolen some important materials, and now he’s running away.
Colin Firth is his former boss, and he’s pissed. Employees aren’t supposed to steal the secrets of Roswell, so he’s determined to get them back. He’s so determined that he psychically enters the brain of Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), to coax locations out of her. He even tries to manipulate her arms in an attempt to stab and kill Daniel. This is one super-pissed-off former employer.
This psychic/supernatural element is entirely unwelcome. Those of you eager to see Spielberg and screenplay writer David Koepp tackling the world’s handling of UFO secrets are probably looking for some speculation regarding what could be in those files. Instead, you get a dopey movie where a guy is messing with people’s heads from afar.
When a TV meteorologist named Margaret (Emily Blunt) starts speaking in really irritating, presumably alien tongues during a local broadcast, she becomes involved in the chase to reveal the covered-up secrets, or something like that. Apparently, she’s been “activated,” whatever the hell that means. Besides alien tongues, she can speak other languages like Russian—and she can read your mind! Again, this veers into the supernatural, which destroys the intrigue of trying to reveal a supposed conspiracy about UFOs.
All of the psychic stuff feels like it should be in another movie. Yes, Close Encounters and E.T. each had a psychic element (Roy’s visions of Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters; Elliott’s mind/heart connection to E.T.), but those approaches blended well into the films. In Disclosure Day, the psychic element feels forced, as if Koepp was backed into a corner on how to push the plot forward. (If you are keeping score, Koepp was also the writer responsible for that much-maligned alien content in Crystal Skull.)
It all builds up to a final five minutes or so where you can see how most of the film’s semi-meager (by today’s blockbuster standards) budget of $115 million was spent. I won’t give anything away, but there are basically two payoffs. One of them is semi-interesting but rushed; the second is absolutely preposterous.
I wish this was a spoiler review, because I really want to go off on how the last note of this movie is so incredibly stupid. Because of the Code of the Movie Critic, I will keep my mouth shut, but holy shit, is it ridiculous.
Because most of the money went into the final few minutes, the CGI effects of animals are abysmal. They look like cartoon characters rather than real beings—and this is in a movie by a guy who made CGI dinosaurs look realistic more than 30 years ago. A racoon in this movie looks like it was lifted from a kindergartener’s coloring book.
I don’t consider the following gripes to be spoilers because they are in the trailers or commercials for the film. As mentioned, most of the movie deals with typical chase-scene tropes, including this highly implausible sequence: Daniel and Margaret are trying to get on a train from their car, which just got hit and is being dragged by said train. Does the conductor notice that he has hit a car and is dragging it along? Nope … the lengthy scene is allowed to play out while the world’s very worst train conductor is oblivious.
Then there is a sequence in which a crop circle magically forms around Daniel. Why does this happen? Absolutely no reason is given. He is on his phone; tensions are heightening; the crop circle forms. No great theory about the origins of crop circles is offered … it just happens.
If you are eying this movie because you dig UFO conspiracy theories and old-school Spielberg alien-movie vibes, you will be severely let down. This movie shouldn’t be called Disclosure Day. It should be called Oh Shit, Colin Firth Is Coming to Get Me!
I’m going to let Elliott looking into the sky and crying, as E.T. leaves him to return home, be the final, defining moment of Spielberg’s alien films. As for Disclosure Day, I’m going to purge this whole misguided mess from my brain.