After offering his own brilliant take on West Side Story in 2021 and delving deep into his early days as a filmmaker with 2022’s The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg has returned to summer blockbuster fare (a market he practically invented himself with Jaws) for his newest film, Disclosure Day.
Starring Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor as two supernaturally gifted strangers thrown together by fate, the film is something of a double homecoming for Spielberg.
Not only is it a blockbuster but one in which aliens, governmental conspiracy and the idea of intergalactic empathy are writ large, all of which feel like key tenets of some of his back catalogue when it comes to science fiction. On paper, it’s a little like Close Encounters meets E.T with a healthy dose of A.I (one shot, in particular, could have come right off that film’s poster), but things are a little more interesting in the telling.
‘History doesn’t have a reset button. If you do this, there’s no undoing it.’
O’Connor plays Daniel, an incredibly intelligent cybersecurity specialist who we meet on the run from his former employer, Colin Firth’s Scanlon. Scanlon’s private company, Wardex, have spent the last seventy-nine years covering up all record of contact between humans and aliens at the government’s behest, and now, with 107 smuggled USB drives in his backpack, Daniel is threatening to blow the secret wide open for all the world to see – ‘full disclosure’, as he puts it.
As Scanlon’s hunt intensifies, Blunt’s Margaret ‘Maggie’ Fairchild, a languishing weather presenter with dreams of becoming a bona fide newsreader, discovers incredible powers of her own, putting her on a collision course with Daniel’s battle for truth.
The film is steeped in intrigue and corporate espionage, helped along by John Williams’ first score since 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. He finds a fantastic niche by scaling his accompaniment back, intentionally eschewing his typically bombastic sensibilities to better support the narrative. While one scene had me on the edge of my seat, reminded of how well Williams can score a chase, the film’s biggest set-piece plays out without any music whatsoever and somehow still manages to feel all the more involving for it.
His work here is perhaps his least hummable soundtrack in recent memory, but it gets the tone of each scene just right, with an air of slightly jazzy mystery that echoes his main theme from Catch Me If You Can or some of the nighttime scenes in Prisoner of Azkaban. It’s always a joy to listen to what he brings to the table and I hope he can carry on saying ‘Oh, go on – let’s do one more!’ for some time yet.
Disclosure Day itself feels rather understated in its pitching, for better or for worse. It’s something of an odd sell in terms of a summer blockbuster, perhaps not as far as marketing is concerned – the trailer has been in the cinema for months, now, and I got more excited to see the full film every time it cropped up – but more so having seen the movie in its entirety. As I walked out of the screening, I had a sense that the film would prove somewhat divisive and that seems to be the case; critics and audiences alike drawing their lines in the sand.
Those of you going into Disclosure Day looking for a breakneck, white-knuckle action ride may find yourselves a little disappointed, as it’s really a far more discursive movie than I was expecting. There are immensely involving action scenes, two of which had me gritting my teeth and leaning forward thinking ‘Come on, come on, come on!’, but they’re few and far between. The narrative as a whole delves much more into the nature of Daniel’s quest than you’d think. It’s a slow pace, but crucially, the film never once felt too long – its 145-minute runtime (which did worry me at first glance) seemed to fly right by.
David Koepp’s script is predominantly built on the shoulders of its many duologues, each character weighing in on the issue with their own perspective, and it’s in each of these that Spielberg’s direction really shines.
While I’d love to go for an off-the-wall, artsy pick, in terms of how many films of his rank among my favourites of all time, Spielberg is surely the director I gel with the most. He’s helmed so many iconic action scenes (I often hesitate to use the word iconic, but with him there’s really no need to) and yet, on balance, some of my favourite scenes from his films are the conversations. Whether it’s the cast of Jurassic Park debating scientific ethics over a plate of Chilean sea bass or the crew of Jaws’ Orca lamenting lost limbs, Spielberg manages to make the dynamics between his characters really crackle.
Here, there’s much made of the possible consequences of the Daniel’s disclosure, from both friend and foe. Eve Hewson has a smaller role as his relatively new girlfriend, Jane (she’s absent for long stretches of the story), but her Christian upbringing begs the question of how an alien incursion may well put doubts in the minds of a great many believers. That’s something that the real-world advocates for extraterrestrial disclosure have taken into account since the movement’s humble beginnings in the 90s.
Even suited scumbag Scanlon has enough to him to fend off any accusations of him being a cookie-cutter villain, and Firth plays him well, particularly in an impassioned scene between him and his former colleague Hugo, the film’s strongest advocate for change (played by a perfectly-cast Colman Domingo).
While I found the interplay very engaging, I had my fingers crossed for a truly show-stopping third act that really nailed the landing. The film didn’t quite manage to meet me on that level – I felt as though things could have stepped up one notch further to really get into gear – but I could at least appreciate the the angle that it did take with its conclusion. There’s rather a lot left to grapple with in the third act, though, and I’m not convinced that it entirely comes together to sing in harmony. One thread that’s mentioned in passing early on seems to become all-important near the very end and I was left wondering quite what was going on regarding the political climate of the film’s imagined world. Things are supposed to feel as though they’re on a knife’s edge, verging on catastrophe, but that threat feels underdeveloped.
The ending, too, comes rather suddenly after a barrage of information, which caught me off-guard. I often find myself wishing that a film had ended sooner – we seem to be living in the Time of Extended Epilogues – but this was a rare case where I felt things could have ran a little longer to pay-off the film’s ongoing thread of optimism and empathy in a seemingly ever-darkening world.
BBFC: Rated 12A for moderate threat, violence, injury detail, infrequent strong language.
Disclosure Day is in cinemas now.
