“Disclosure Day” Taps into Our Real-World Obsession with Alien Life

Emily Blunt as Margaret Fairchild in Disclosure Day. Universal Pictures

Aliens have been a hot topic in our news and culture lately, with the release of countless videos of UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena)—more widely known as UFOs. This couldn’t be more timely for the release of Steven Spielberg’s new film, Disclosure Day, which tackles questions about alien discoveries.

Spielberg has spent a lot of his career analyzing aliens, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and War of the Worlds. In this film, he asks, “If alien life does exist, who has the right to know about it, and what impact will that information have on our world?” Which is why, in many ways, Disclosure Day mimics exactly what is happening right now in our society. That connection alone makes the movie worth a watch, but it requires more than that to become a Spielberg classic.

Universal Pictures

There’s a specific feeling you get when watching a Steven Spielberg movie that can be hard to identify. It’s a feeling of awe and wonder that comes from the combination of things like a classic John Williams score, elaborate camera movements, and ordinary characters put in extraordinary situations. There’s a sort of spectacle throughout all of his films that helps us look at the world a little differently. All of these trademarks are present in Disclosure Day, but some elements are more effective than others.

I really like the premise of the movie. It follows a local meteorologist, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), and a government cybersecurity expert, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who are caught up in a plan to expose all government information and recordings surrounding discoveries of alien life on Earth, as well as multiple alien artifacts that provide dangerous but powerful abilities. Both characters seem to have an unexplained connection to the extraterrestrial world and are being used as a source of communication with humankind. There are unique and fresh ideas around the alien technology, which were the biggest source of my enjoyment during this film—anytime those elements were being explored, I was fully engaged. Despite being about aliens, the plot is grounded in the human characters and their reactions to the situation. This was an interesting choice that ultimately worked for me.

Universal Pictures

The flip side of that enjoyment is the countless moments of generic action that get us from one scene to the next. Throughout the entire film, Daniel and Margaret are being chased by the government organization Wardex, led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), which has full control over the alien videos and artifacts. While these scenes weren’t inherently bad, they just became repetitive, and in a lot of instances it felt like they didn’t have that large of an impact on the overall story. Daniel and Margaret don’t have much to do throughout the 145-minute runtime beyond trying to escape from government agents and make it back to the exact same place that the story began. This seems to simply be a way to inject moments of excitement into an otherwise clever and intellectual story. While I wouldn’t want to expunge the entire film of action, I do wish we could have spent more time in scenes that develop the characters and the sci-fi elements. Not to mention, the resolution of this extended chase scene was extremely unsatisfying and fell completely flat after building tension for the entire span of the movie.

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The character building is the other aspect of the film that falls short, causing our main characters to be relatively shallow. Beyond some minor details about Daniel’s and Margaret’s jobs and their childhood connection to aliens, we barely get to know anything about them. The only other details we get are that Daniel went to jail for a cybercrime and Margaret’s dad had Parkinson’s disease; this, by the way, never comes back into the story and seems to be a completely arbitrary fact that has no purpose in being brought up in the first place. All this is to say that I felt no connection at all to these characters. Emily Blunt’s portrayal of Margaret is different from what I’ve seen from her in the past, but there is something off about her portrayal that left me confused about what type of person Margaret really is. Josh O’Connor, on the other hand, plays exactly the same character that I’ve seen him play in everything else he’s starred in. Which is a bummer, because I do enjoy him on screen, but I wish he would branch out a little more.

Josh O’Connor as Daniel Kellner. Universal Pictures

By the time we got to the climax, I began to regain a little more interest as the film started to engage with its overall question about the impact of knowledge about alien life on our planet. This scene did invoke a unique experience of comparing a fictional film to the images and videos that have been revealed to us recently in or news and social media feeds. That being said, there were a few art direction choices that I wish had been different from what we’ve seen in every other alien movie. This could have elevated the visuals to represent a world even closer to our reality and made the sci-fi elements of the story more believable.

Universal Pictures

While Disclosure Day is far from a masterpiece, I still think there’s enough here to justify seeing it in theaters. It seems to hope its audience will simply go along for the ride and not think too deeply about what’s being said or happening on screen. If you’re a fan of sci-fi or alien pop culture, I imagine you will be able to get absorbed in the spectacle and overlook some of the issues I had. And, of course, it’s always fun to see a film from one of the greatest directors of all time, even if this clearly isn’t his best work.