The prospect of Steven Spielberg returning to the world of aliens and summer blockbusters seems like a match made in heaven, the answer to the prayers of millions of eager moviegoers. Disclosure Day, based on a story Spielberg has been developing for decades, is all about forces trying to alert the world that aliens indeed do exist. The primary figures are Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a government whistle-blower on the run, and Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a local TV meteorologist who is suddenly speaking in foreign tongues, reading people’s minds, and even appearing as different people in the perception of others. Both are on a collision course to find one another and discover a repressed shared past as children. It just so happens there are a lot of armed paramilitary goons who want to stop them.

Disclosure Day is an old-fashioned Spielberg popcorn thriller, for better and for worse. Let’s focus on the good first. It’s an easy movie to get on board with, as the plot moves almost immediately from the start and it becomes one extended series of chases and escapes up until the very end, which makes for an exciting movie that has a definite sense of forward momentum. Does it always make sense? Do you care about the characters? Well, we’ll get more into that later, because right now we’re celebrating what works with Disclosure Day. It’s been eight years since Spielberg made a big-screen blockbuster action-thriller (Ready Player One), albeit it’s been twenty years since he made a great one (2005’s War of the Worlds). He’s been more prone to introspective or technically adventurous filmmaking choices of late, so to have Spielberg readopt the blockbuster mantle, and with aliens no less, feels like a thematic homecoming for the man who defined modern cinema over the last fifty years. He’s always been a little squishy and corny in his approach, and that can certainly be welcomed during trying times such as we find ourselves in (hopefully things have settled and improved when you’re reading this in the future). It’s a familiar yet old-fashioned model for a modern blockbuster that Spielberg helped perfect, so to have him return to this mode and have fun can be rewarding, especially for longtime fans giddy that the master is coming back to the world of extra terrestrials. Spielberg can still position his camera and visual arrangements like nobody else, and just immersing yourself in a masterful cinematic storyteller’s whims can be transporting and uplifting even if you’re not exactly on the same wavelength. In short, it’s gratifying to just experience Spielberg operate in his blockbuster space considering the man is almost 80. Who knows if we’ll ever get another one of these kinds of movies again, so there’s something thematically fitting for the master to return to his roots for added social commentary and sentiment.

I had more problems with the old-fashioned qualities of the movie that didn’t feel like they connected for me and connected to a realistic depiction of our modern-day. The problem with a movie set in the present-day that concerns the revelation of alien encounters is that it’s hard to get a plurality of Americans to believe anything no matter if it’s scientific and correct. Just recall the COVID outbreak at the turn of this decade where people couldn’t even agree on things like masking preventing the public spread of viral infection and vaccines being a life-saver. We had people literally eating horse paste and drinking silver nitrate because charlatans told them to do so. The crux of Disclosure Day rests firmly on the world believing the public disclosure of aliens, presented none other than through network evening news. It’s a bit outdated to think that enough Americans, let alone the world, would hold faith in mainstream network news in our increasingly splintered and information silo-ed era. There are people this week who claimed one political party was controlling the weather to the embarrassment of the other political party, and you’re going to tell me these people are going to believe in the existence of aliens because it happens to be presented by TV news? That’s a bit naive, but I think Spielberg could have sidestepped this by having the movie set in the 1980s or 1990s. It would have been more believable, and holding onto collective faith in humanity coming together in times of crises would be more aspirational rather than, you know, remembering that some people rejected minor inconveniences that could save lives like they were tyrannical affronts to liberties. I don’t know about you, but my ultimate faith in humanity has only lowered when it comes to collective action and shared sacrifice in the name of the greater good.

Brushing aside my own cynical modern perspective, the conspiracy itself, and the machinations of the participants, is kept so frustratingly vague with arbitrary solutions. The movie is populated by two clandestine forces, one looking to divulge the existence of aliens and expose the coverup, and other looking to maintain that coverup. You can easily label them Good Guys and Bad Guys for all the complexity provided. That’s fine. The teams can be generic stock roles as long as our main characters are interesting and well-developed. Unfortunately, our main characters feel easily forgotten, often dropping in and out of the movie for unknown reasons and miraculously reappearing in the exact right moments. There’s a climactic showdown where Team Bad Guys is literally going to shut off the power to the TV news station because that will completely stop the flow of information (it’s not like people would just record with their phones and upload to social media). Then all of a sudden, a character that hasn’t been seen for twenty minutes, is just there, and they have a magic alien device that they know will… restore the power. As a climax, it just feels so goofy, outdated, and sloppy in its clumsy plotting. The bad guys have the power to inhabit other people’s minds and control their bodies, so why aren’t they doing this all the time? Once you start introducing alien technology without any clear definition or limits, it basically becomes a magic wand that can provide whatever the user, or the screenwriter, desires in that moment. It’s an obvious narrative cheat. There are occasions where this power can be diverting and fun, like an invisible escape that doesn’t make much sense but was at least entertaining to experience. However, because so much of the story elements are under-developed, it makes the ultimate showdown unfulfilling.

Another hindrance is that many of the characters feel more as tools of the story to get it from Point A to Point B rather than fleshed-out people. Not every character in a genre thriller needs to feel three-dimensionally accurate, but they need to feel interesting, at least enough to make us care or be curious. Daniel Kellner is the biggest dud for me. I genuinely like O’Connor as an actor and found him mightily compelling in last year’s Wake Up Dead Man, but he’s given so little to work with here. Being the point man on exposing a conspiracy should be plenty, and given the harrowing circumstances of constantly having to look over your shoulder it should provide plenty of mental conflict and second-guessing, showcasing different aspects of who this person can be. Instead, he’s less a character than a figure in motion, the person everyone else is chasing after. He’s more plot device than person.

Margaret is the more interesting character as she’s undergoing a mysterious change that she is struggling to recognize, but halfway through that confusion gives way to godhood, as she becomes essentially a superhero with powers of convenience. No matter what trouble she gets into, the script goes into a cheat code to get her out with a new alien power of contrivance. At some point, she stops even questioning or reflecting on these changes and just goes with it, which feels like the characterization simply giving up. It’s a shame because there’s great drama in the existential and personal crisis she was experiencing. I liked her revulsion at being worshiped as a religious icon once she could appear as people’s dead loved ones. Honestly, a whole different movie could have explored the psychological ramifications of that power and the needs of others to see and talk to departed loved ones one last time, to seek affirmations and closure, all against her own sense of agency with a power she feels has hijacked her identity. In the end, these two characters are mainly here to help convey the message, a human game of intergalactic telephone.

The biggest problem for me, besides the lackluster characterization, is that the most interesting part of this movie is its unsaid implications. I am less enthralled by two competing factions fighting over the alien conspiracy and more interested in how the world responds to the momentous revelation that we are not alone. I kind of wish that Disclosure Day’s Act Three had been its Act One, and rather ending on whether or not the world would discover the truth about little green men, the movie confirmed it and then said, “For the next 90 minutes, we’re really going to dig into how this affects people and changes society.” That’s the movie I want to see, the what comes next. The film briefly explores the spiritual ramifications as one character, a former nun, tries to square her faith with the reality of other intelligent life in the wider universe. Is that revelation comforting and confirmation or conflicting and confusing? I really wish the screenplay had gone further in that exploration, something akin to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which richly examined the upheaval to societies and personal identity. I suppose I was looking for more of what happens after Disclosure Day rather than leading up to the big disclosure, and I doubt I’m alone.

I will also be spoiling the exact ending because I believe it deserves unpacking, so if you would like to remain spoiler-free, please skip to the next paragraph, dear reader. Alright, with that out of the way, the climax hinges upon the news about aliens being disseminated to the public. It’s a little strange that so much of the climax is merely watching the footage with our characters on the sidelines. In fact, the emotional point of emphasis is placed on a new character, a news anchor played by Courtney Grace, who narrates the footage and its implications in real time. Her performance might be the best in the movie (Blunt is good, folks, but let’s pump the brakes on those “career-best” declarations) as she shows restrained and nuanced emotion trying to process the amazing and perspective-shifting revelation. It’s just strange that so much is placed on a brand-new character so late into the movie. Regardless, what stupefied me was that after all this the good guys literally roll out an elderly alien being in a wheelchair. What? You had a literal living, breathing, well more like rasping-alien (don’t want to cast aspersions, but maybe this alien adopted smoking in his time planet-side) and you just keep him at bay? Your whole goal is to raise awareness about the existence of aliens and you literally have an alien to prove the existence of aliens. Why did everything have to hinge on these two adults realizing they were given special powers as kids? Why did they have to wait 30-plus years for these powers to manifest? Why didn’t aliens just give adults these powers rather than children to wait on their maturation? Could the old alien not learn one of Earth’s languages or at least how to type? We have magic devices that can generally do anything but the creators of these magic devices cannot conceive of something to resolve a predictable language barrier? If the script were stronger or the characters engaging, my brain wouldn’t be consumed with these questions.

Reluctantly, Disclosure Day fits squarely in the fulcrum between good and not so good, teetering between one direction and the other. It’s got high production values, good actors, and Spielberg cooking in the sci-fi/action/thriller realm. It’s enjoyably more tactile with its action set pieces, of which some are exciting and visually inventive. Others are just characters getting overlooked in plain sight, and this is before they introduce magic invisibility. However, the promise of the movie is never truly fulfilled from a story awash in underdeveloped characters and themes, arbitrary and overly convenient plotting, and a resolution that feels less than satisfying and more confusing in execution and implication. I genuinely wish that Disclosure Day was more about the aftermath of the news rather than the reaching of the disclosure itself. Even a middling Spielberg thriller can still have more entertainment than the best of many filmmakers, so I’m sure many filmgoers can find something to enjoy, but they’re just as likely to find something that sticks in their proverbial craw, that they chew over for days, and question why it couldn’t be better.

Nate’s Grade: C+