Review of the Week: Disclosure Day

(145 mins, 12A, in cinemas now)

When Steven Spielberg has a new movie out, it’s an event. Something to put in the calendar, tell your friends about, buy your tickets in advance, queue around the block for. When Steven Spielberg has a new alien movie out: even better. This is the guy who, 50 years ago, invented the summer blockbuster with Jaws – like an alien movie, only with sharks – then shaped the popular conception of extraterrestrials with key subsequent additions to the canon: Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, E.T. in 1982 and, in 2005, his take on H.G. Wells's genre-originating 1898 novel, War of the Worlds.

Disclosure Day is part of that Spielberg-specific, event-movie tradition, as well as an older one, dating back to the 1950s cold-war, paranoia-seeped sci-fi that the director himself grew up on. Films like Invaders From Mars (1953) and The War of The Worlds (1953) are a reminder of the days when getting abducted and anally probed by Martians would be a pleasant respite from constant anxiety about nuclear annihilation. Since then, we’ve had alien films which are allegories for feminism (Arrival, Alien), colonialism (Independence Day, District 9) or corporate greed (the Alien franchise again). But what does this one mean to this audience at this time? And will you even care, when you’re so thoroughly immersed in sensory delights? 

I doubt it. Disclosure Day is superlative entertainment with spectacular action sequences, a surprising flair for slapstick and perfect performances. Especially from Emily Blunt, but also from Josh O’Connor, Colman Domingo’s velvety voice and Colin Firth’s sweaty forehead. O’Connor plays Daniel Kellner, a tech-whiz whistleblower who has absconded from the shadowy extra-governmental agency Wardex with some proprietary tech – or some “essential truth”, depending on your worldview. Now Wardex CEO Noah Scanlon (Firth) wants this tech-truth returned at all costs. But Daniel also has help, at the other end of a burner phone line, from Hugo (Domingo) – a Professor X to Scanlon’s Magneto – who is constructing some kind of large-scale movie set in an aircraft hangar, the purpose of which will later be revealed. 

Meanwhile, in the midwest, Blunt is Margaret Fairchild, a restlessly ambitious weathergirl for local TV news station KCXE, with a comically useless boyfriend (Wyatt Russell), whose dormant supernatural powers are awoken by a startling close encounter of the first kind. (As any keen ufologist can tell you, this refers to a sighting only, according to the 1972 scale devised by researcher J Allen Hynek and popularised by Spielberg’s 1977 film.)

The less you see the better, anyway. A tease of tentacle, or a glimpse of goo, is far scarier than some CGI extravaganza. That’s the prevailing sci-fi-horror wisdom, which Spielberg’s films helped institute. We have to assume, therefore, that what this film discloses about the aliens' physical form, it discloses with intent. And, as one character comments, they look a bit like children. More specifically, laid out on stretchers with their small, frail bodies supporting oversized heads, they are – unavoidably and disturbingly – reminiscent of the images of child victims of global famine and war, which are broadcast in TV news reports, and, latterly, in our social media feeds, with increasing frequency.  

Childhood is another classic Spielbergian concern, and there is something childlike too in the yearning throughout Disclosure Day for a parental alien to come and intervene in our earthling squabbles (world war three once again looms), tell us we’re all just overtired, and tuck us in for a nap with a theremin-based lullaby. Alongside Project Hail Mary and the Apple TV show Pluribus, it’s part of sci-fi’s new pro-alien consensus, with a cheery message best summarised as: “Let’s face it lads, at this point in global history, a benevolent alien invasion is basically humanity’s only hope.”

The most wilfully naive aspect of Disclosure Day, however, must be its narrative suggestion that, if only people were exposed to the truth about the suffering governments inflict in our names, we would rise up, band together, and put a stop to it. 

Would we? The notion that a single day – be it “Independence Day”, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” or “Disclosure Day” – could galvanise the world en masse is highly entertaining, but surely has more to do with an optimum box office sales strategy than reality. Disclosure days come and go and nothing changes. It’s not disclosure, it’s distraction. It’s not revelation, it’s relaxation. That’s why I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords. They’re certainly preferable to the morally vacuous, man-child tech titans who currently run the shop.