Spielberg's "Disclosure Day" is a mystery without meaning — review

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There’s a particular kind of disappointment that only a good filmmaker can deliver, and Disclosure Day is steeped in it. This isn’t a bad movie, exactly. It’s something more frustrating: a missed opportunity, made by a director standing on the most fertile ground and for some reason refusing to dig.

Steven Spielberg has spent his career circling the idea of first contact with aliens. The closest comparison here is 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind , and the comparison is not kind to the new film. In Close Encounters , the government is secretly working toward contact, while ordinary civilians, struck by visions they can’t explain, get pulled into the orbit of an enormous, cosmic project. The film breathes a beautiful rhythm of mystery, reveal, and renewed mystery. The secretive authorities turn out to be, in their own way, the good guys. And the civilians at the center — above all, Richard Dreyfuss, the film’s protagonist — risk everything to reach the mountaintop in the finale. They have agency. They earn the encounter.

Disclosure Day throws nearly all of that away. The government is absent. In its place is the Wardex Corporation, a shadowy government contractor that functions like a secret-police outfit, existing mainly to suppress the truth and be disliked — a point the film hammers home with a video of them interrogating and torturing a helpless alien for no discernible reason. Meanwhile, the humans drawn toward contact don’t understand what’s happening to them and never gain any agency over it. They’re possessed, compelled, going through motions they don’t choose. They aren’t protagonists so much as passengers.

The deeper problem is that the film withholds the one thing it exists to deliver. Disclosure — the actual event, the thing the whole title promises — doesn’t arrive until the final seconds. We never hear what the aliens have to say. There’s a single, interesting line suggesting they regard empathy as nature’s greatest evolved capacity, which is a genuinely beautiful idea, but the movie does absolutely nothing with it. It’s stated and abandoned. We never see how the world reckons with the revelation, never watch humanity absorb the news. Every hard, interesting, worth-writing question — what does disclosure mean, what does it cost, how do we change — gets quietly sidestepped. The screenplay doesn’t fumble those parts. It declines to attempt them.

What’s left is suspense in search of a subject: a hollow chase movie about getting away from contractor thugs.

The characters suffer accordingly. Colin Firth’s antagonist spends the entire film going to extraordinary lengths to bury the truth, then, in the closing moment, simply sits down in a chair and lets it happen. Nothing has changed his mind. He just seems tired. It plays less like a resolution than a surrender the story never earned. Emily Blunt’s protagonist is even harder to hold onto because she’s possessed for most of the runtime, and we never actually meet her. We know she’s buried a childhood trauma, and we know she wants to be a news anchor, and that’s about the sum of who she is. You can’t root for a person the film never introduces you to.

The waste is sharpest with Josh O’Connor, who plays arguably the film’s lead. The movie opens strongly on him, trading the top-secret material he’s smuggled out for the safe return of his girlfriend from the secret-police thugs — an Edward Snowden figure who leaked the truth because he believes it belongs to the whole world. It’s a terrific setup. In a better version of this movie, he would use his training, skills, and insider knowledge to stay one step ahead of his pursuers, a Jason Bourne with a conscience. We get exactly one scene of that in the first ten minutes, and then it evaporates. From there, he mostly runs, trips, gets captured by the bad guys, and is eventually simply found by the good ones. O’Connor is a wonderful actor handed a bland character, and by the end, he’s given us no more reason to root for him than anyone else.

Spielberg being Spielberg, there are reaches for emotional weight, and they mostly land on the same note: Both leads were abducted as children and have blocked it out. It’s a decent idea on paper, but it never grabbed me — partly because the film leans on it instead of giving these people present-tense desires worth caring about. There’s also a baffling subplot in which one character objects to the truth coming out because it might compete with people’s belief in God. Every gesture toward religion in this movie is unnecessary; reaching for profundity it hasn’t built the foundation for.

I had some fun. It’s a popcorn movie, and it moves. But it’s also very long, and the length only sharpens how little is actually underneath it. That’s the real verdict: not that Disclosure Day is terrible, but that it’s inflated and hollow when it had every reason to be awesome and compelling. This was Spielberg returning to the richest material of his career, and the result is all mystery, no meaning — a movie that gestures at the biggest question we could ever ask and then looks away just as the answer arrives.

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