SPOILERS AHEAD: The general critical verdict about Steven Sielberg‘s Disclosure Day is somewhere between “pretty good” and “woo-woo good.”
A good guys-vs.-bad guys drama about an underground effort to stop suppressing information about alien visitors, DD is fast-moving, diverting and imaginative as far as it goes. I agree with the “pretty good” consensus, and I’m especially down with the final 35 or 40 minutes, which is all about (surprise!) crescendos and emotional payoffs and (what else?) generous servings of Spielberg-alien-awe face. But I wouldn’t trust the woo-woos.
So let’s not get carrried away. Disclosure Day is fine or even better-than-fine, but aside from one or two high-energy spurts it feels a bit..what words apply?…mid-range or cerebral or subdued or something. It’s never dull but…well, it just never got my blood going. Not really, I mean. Except at the end.
When it comes to lopsided, holy-shit car-chase thrillers, which is what the first 105 minutes of Disclosure Day basically are, HE has one ironclad requirement: the sympathetic hunted guys can’t make any stupid moves. If they screw up in some bullshit, boneheaded way, I tend to get angry and alienated and am soon exhaling loudly in my seat.
Emily Blunt‘s Margaret Fairchild, a TV weather girl based in Kansas City, and her boyfriend, Wyatt Russell‘s Jackson, get chased around by dozens of baddie-waddies in slick black cars (i.e., faceless goons under the command of Colin Firth‘s Noah Scanlon and employed by Wardex Corporation, which is basically about suppression of alien information) but they handle themselves reasonably well.
Blunt does more than that when she becomes a master of suggestion or, if you will, a practitioner of Alec Guinness-styled Jedi mind tricks.
But Josh O’Connor‘s Daniel Kellner, a former Wardex man who’s become devoted to the free and open sharing of alien information and, to that end, is carrying several flash drives that contain 79 years of visual data that proves the existence of alien visitors, screws up in two significant ways.
Kellner is too trusting of his slightly chubby girlfriend, a former nun called Jane (Eve Hewson) who feels that sharing alien info with the general populace will somehow undermine their spirit or diminish the importance of God or some such rubbish. (Only an idiotic God-believer would imagine that His/Her domain doesn’t include the entire universe.) Because Jane sympathizes on some level (subconsciously or otherwise) with the Wardex suppressionists, she winds up betraying Daniel not once but twice.
HE to Daniel: “She’s bad news, bruh! Love is blind but she’s not a realist and you can’t trust her. Cut her loose.”
After Jane’s second betrayal (i.e., alerting the Wardex guys to a remote location where she and Daniel have been hiding out), Josh steals one of the many Wardex cars that are parked near the hideout and drives right toward the others…brilliant!…smashing into this and that auto.
I was shaking my head back and forth and almost moaning with frustration. I really can’t give my support to a fellow who’s too dumb not to drive away from the villains. Then Daniel grabs Turncoat Jane and shoves her into his car. The man is hopeless,
Eventually Spielberg tires of the chase stuff and shifts focus to the big finale, whch includes the metaphorical alien spirit animals…a red cardinal, a fox, an elk (or is it a large-antlered deer?). And then, around the 115- or 120-minute mark, comes the big moment in which Daniel’s flash drives are finally uploaded to the TV station where Margaret does her weather-girling, and before you know it the whole world is wise to the entire alien-visitation portfolio.
And then Fairchild, sitting in an anchor chair, gives a gentle, thoughtful speech to the world about the meaning of what’s been revealed. Her very last line is “listen”, which is a variation on the final line in Howard Hawks’ The Thing (`1951): “Watch the skies”
There’s no question that Blunt does a LOT of strenuous acting in Disclosure Day. She blathers, yelps, convulses, cries out, shudders, shrieks. She really delivers in terms of vigorous “acting.”