Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is a movie filled with somehows and for some reasons. Somehow, aliens have been visiting Earth for decades, and a shadowy arm of the government called Wardex has been tasked with safekeeping the evidence. And for some reason, two civilians who don’t know each other have become vessels for the aliens: One day, seemingly out of the blue, they can read minds, shapeshift and solve impossible equations.
One of them, a Wardex employee named Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), is a math genius who, as the movie begins, is on the run with a bag full of stolen evidence. On his trail is a sniveling Wardex executive played by Colin Firth, who has harnessed extraterrestrial intelligence to hijack other peoples’ brains.
Meanwhile, a TV meteorologist named Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) has, somehow, become possessed by forces beyond explanation: She can suddenly speak any language and know everyone’s secrets just by looking at them.
Somehow, Daniel and Margaret know they must find each other, and that the fate of humanity is dependent on them leaking top-secret Area 51 footage. In the background, we hear about heightening tensions with North Korea. There’s also, for some reason, business involving another whistleblower played by Colman Domingo, who’s constantly taking phone calls from our mightily perplexed heroes; he’s dictating their journey while building a Hollywood set on a soundstage somewhere.
That character may be an avatar for Spielberg himself, a steady-handed sage directing the players and constructing an illusion that may, for some reason, unlock buried childhood memories. It would be fitting, because Spielberg’s previous film, The Fabelmans, was disarmingly candid about how his upbringing shaped (and was distorted by) his own work. Here, he’s like an old maestro running through his hits: fugitives with superpowers, bumbling government agents, an otherworldly presence making us question our place in the universe, and lots of chases.
Disclosure Day is, no surprise, brilliantly made, because no other blockbuster filmmaker has as skillful an eye as Spielberg. His camera, wielded by his go-to cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, swoops and weaves around the actors, the fluid dolly and crane shots drawing us into the action and distracting us from the fact that the movie itself is a bunch of nonsense.
David Koepp’s screenplay, based on an original idea by Spielberg, doesn’t have a clear throughline, a great, tantalizing hook that pulls us from start to finish. Spielberg has made some of the greatest entertainments about our fascination with beings from other planets, mining it for wide-eyed wonder (E.T.), menace (War of the Worlds) and sometimes both (Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
Disclosure Day doesn’t have the graceful narrative economy of those films. It’s all cluttered up with half-formed ideas, ill-defined supporting characters, murky revelations and dialogue about the nature of truth and faith that may as well be delivered from a pulpit. It’s the hokey optimism of 1950s sci-fi fused with the freneticism of ’90s paranoid thrillers.
All the pieces for a rousing, wondrous, heady entertainment are here. The way they’ve been put together, they don’t form a coherent picture. Somehow.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s "Movies 101", heard Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.