Spielberg spills another big alien secret

You know it’s Steven Spielberg when your main characters are backlit by some otherworldly glowing light, and a bunch of Men in Black are shown leaping out of cars, ready to clamp down on our heroes.

That particular motif has been heavily employed in past Spielberg classics like E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and now his latest release, Disclosure Day.

Throughout his career, Spielberg has swerved, memorably, into the realm of sci-fi and government conspiracy. Some of his best movies involved Visitors From Other Worlds, whether friendly and wise (Close Encounters, E.T.) or devastatingly destructive (War of the Worlds). With Disclosure Day, co-written by David Koepp from an original story by Spielberg, it begins innocuously enough with Emily Blunt playing Margaret, a cheery, somewhat quirky Kansas City TV meteorologist, suddenly spouting Russian phrases over breakfast Fruit Loops, freaking out her slacker boyfriend (Wyatt Russell). Spielberg centers her in the story, but soon we meet Daniel (Josh O’Connor), a scientist who’s being hunted for stealing secrets from a tech company known as Wardex. He’s on the run with former nun/current girlfriend Jane (played by Bono’s daughter, Ewe Hewson).

Margaret and Daniel’s paths meet, of course, as they both seem to be psychically linked to knowledge about the stolen Wardex items, including flash drives loaded with videos. Can you guess what those videos are about? Good. You’ve watched Spielberg’s Close Encounters, and maybe X-Files. 

Spielberg has spoken of the importance of Hollywood embracing “original stories,” instead of endless franchise retreads. The director was reportedly entranced by a New York Times’ article called “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,” and set Koepp to work fleshing out his story idea. It probably ties in with his recurring interest in how people might deal with contact from extraterrestrial life—which has often proven to be quite cinematic.

The details in Spielberg’s story are, at times, a little sketchy, like a visual involving crop circles that basically goes nowhere, and the presence of attentive furry woodland creatures that seem to have escaped from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

But what holds our attention more is a tightening bond between Margaret and Daniel, two hapless strangers thrown together as ruthless government-aligned Wardex thugs are dispatched to track them by bearded baddie Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), who (literally) tries to dig into the duo’s brains. Colman Domingo, meanwhile, arrives as a reassuring presence, playing a Wardex defector pushing to release the secret files.

Spielberg started his career with chase films (Sugarland Express, Duel), and this one excels at that in a few sequences involving runaway trains and invisible firetrucks (watch; don’t ask). Blunt, though somewhat hysterical at times, seems spot-on as the woman who suddenly discovers she has powers she’d never imagined before—the ability to instantly gather people’s personal biodata and memories, for instance, just by gazing at them. O’Connor plays a math savant who has cracked the channeled alien babble that Blunt’s antennae are picking up, and they’re off and running.

There are interesting side debates about what would happen to humanity if alien existence were confirmed. Would it send the public into spiritual crisis, panic buying, or generally freaking out when they learn We Are Not Alone? I’m not so sure anymore, what with the Trump administration recently dumping tons of actual Air Force videos of UAPs zipping around—most likely released as a distraction from other policy problems—and just letting the public sort out its meaning. The public seems to have emitted a collective yawn. Reality is weird enough already without throwing aliens into the mix, it seems. Even as the US government acknowledges there are unexplainable things in our skies, that’s about as far as they’ll go.

Disclosure Day posits something closer to the paranoid vibe of 1978’s Close Encounters: that the government routinely goes to great lengths to mislead and cover up its secrets. But it somehow lacks that earlier film’s resonance, its sense of newness and wonder.

I’d hoped for a more convincing slam-dunk from Spielberg on the alien subject, considering his back catalogue: maybe a kind of pulse read on where the discussion now stands. What his story comes up with is nothing new to Chris Carter fans (We’ve been lied to by the government! Since Roswell!!!), but at least it lands on a message that now seems almost quaint, yet still calming and necessary in today’s toxic environment: We really do need to listen to one another.