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.
Dumb movie. The ending is so stupid. Very disappointing. Spielberg has lost his touch.
It seems you have missed some important elements. The ‘psychic stuff’ is showing you what remote viewing can do – that in itself is scary that people have these skills already. Many experts believe aliens communicate psychically rather than speaking. Emily Blunts noises relate to mathematics as communication – the universal language. I think if you aren’t aware of this knowledge then you miss a lot of the clues and cues that the movie is giving us. Its not so much a story but more of a message
Movie was absolute trash. I think my eyes spent more time rolling than they did peering at the screen. Useless, campy, annoying.
Disclosure Day is another grain of sand on a beach of forgettable movies. The performances are unimpressive, the score has no signature or hook, and the CGI, sets, and costume design do not captivate.
This film does not entertain unless you like watching 2.5 hours of car chases. That’s right, I said car chases and not space ship chases/battles. I am fine with a minimal action alien movie but breadcrumb me with their motives or culture. This film does none of that. The movie gives you no reason to care about these characters or aliens at all. There are no scenes establishing why we should like or dislike anything. Most scenes contain police cars pulling up to a place, the police literally let everyone leave without any struggle, and another car chase ensues. Rinse repeat.
No risks were taken in this movie. The design of the aliens is lazy; straight bog standard. The music has no earworm appeal. It’s straight out of a stock catalog. Where is my Jaws theme? Where is my Jurassic Park theme? Where is my Forest Gump feather theme?!
People will say “well I thought the message was good” and I agree but if the movie is the vehicle to convey this message, it’s a lemon. Listen.
Dear sir. Seems you ignore the fact that the psychic/supernatural’ element has everything to do with the UFO/UAP Phenomenon. Which probaly also has very little to do with ‘interplanetary nut-and-bolts ET spacecraft’, ‘machines-as-we know-them’. Unfortunately the movie falls for the largely untenable ‘ET hypothesis’. The world of real UFO/UAPs is a world of the mind, the spirit, the soul, the so-called’ ‘extra-inter-dimensional’… meaning the Phenomenon, when seen in its full scope, frequency, distribution and historical/cultural perspective, fits much better, as a whole, into the Extra-Interdiemnsional/Paraphysical Hypothesis. And as it turns out , it includes ‘fringe’ (Scientifucally unacknowledged) phenomena like telepathy, automatic writing, ‘spirit possession’ and everything to do with the Occult, Mythology, Folklore, world religions.
The fact that you liked Kingdom of the Crystal Skull makes me question your judgement. That movie is unwatchable, from the opening scene of Indy surviving a nuclear blast in a refrigerator, to Shia Labeouf’s acting (if you can call it acting), the jungle scene with the monkeys on the vines, to the ridiculous storyline, it’s a complete mess.
My wife & I didn’t hate it as much as the movie critic, but we were disappointed as we were hoping for a more introspective study of disclosure with a few less car chases.
This critic got it. Great review.