Disclosure Day
Review by Mark Woodring
The wait is over. Steven Spielberg returns to the big screen, once more with a tale about humanity and its place in the wider universe.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a certified classic, as is E.T. The Extraterrestrial.
Heck, even his take on War of the Worlds is clearly a Spielbergian product.
With Disclosure Day, he’s reaching father than he has before, challenging us to ask the truly big question about what not being alone actually means.
**NOTE: You can read Mark’s review below, then listen as he and Ryan discuss the film further. Remember, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
145 Minutes, Rated PG-13
Written by David Koepp, Steven Spielberg
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Synopsis:
If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? The truth belongs to eight billion people.
The religious aspects of Disclosure Day cannot be overlooked. It’s mentioned multiple times to various characters, and is a perfectly valid question. Regardless of your personal religious beliefs (or lack thereof), what would the revelation of “superior/supreme” beings do to your belief system?
Kansas City weatherwoman Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) finds herself at the crux of the revelations after Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) steals 79 years of secret information regarding aliens from WARDEX, the big-bad of the film, headed by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth in a suitably villainous role). WARDEX, once a partner of the US Government, is now a stereotypically evil, capitalist corporation, hiding the truth from the world.
Protecting us from ourselves and our reactions, if you will.
Sort of. I mean, they’re not wrong, I suppose. Even Men In Black acknowledged that “a person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals.”
So Firth’s villain is kind of right, here. But still a villain because that’s his rationalization, not his motivation.
The world Spielberg’s movie inhabits is on the brink of war due to conflict in Korea (a pleasant change from the normal Middle-East or Russian tensions, I suppose), which somewhat echoes the current state of affairs in our world.
As the movie progresses, David Koepp’s script continues to unwind the moments leading to the inevitable Disclosure Day event, but there’s something…
Looks, this is a good movie; a solid movie…
But the film’s true strength lies in the performances of it’s stellar cast. Blunt, O’Connor, Firth, and Colman Domingo as the ring leader of the resistance, and even from Eve Hewson as Jane, Daniel’s girlfriend.
Their scenes together are really, really powerful, and I enjoyed every second of them.
But overall, Disclosure Day isn’t showing us anything new, nothing we haven’t seen before, even from Spielberg himself. But it’s most compelling moments are the human ones, not the alien ones. It’s Spielberg’s dedication to pushing the idea that humanity can, indeed, handle such a revelation, that is the heart of the film for me.
The idea of faith vs evidence and humanity’s limitless capacity for hope resonated for me, so I left the theater thoroughly satisfied with the film. Your mileage may vary, depending upon what you take in and what you hope to take out.
But it’s definitely a winner from Spielberg, one which has a spot on my all-too-early awards radar.
Disclosure Day lands in theaters Friday, June 12, and stars Josh O’Connor, Emily Blunt, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo, Eve Hewson, and Wyatt Russell.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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