‘Disclosure Day’ Review: Steven Spielberg’s Invigorating Chase Thriller Taps Into the Mania for Alien Conspiracy Theory, but It Never Becomes a Close Encounter With Wonder

You could say the Trump administration did a huge favor to “Disclosure Day” by releasing a trove of America’s UFO files — excuse me, UAP files — just last month. The timing was a coincidence, but it felt like the perfect piece of publicity to drum up anticipation for Steven Spielberg’s epic thriller about a rogue attempt to disclose U.S. government evidence of alien visitations. Of course, it doesn’t take rocket science to see why Trump released those files (can you say…distraction?). And the grand irony is that the effect of them may not be to set up “Disclosure Day” in quite the ideal way one assumed.

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The UAP files show a lot of things we’ve seen before — in grainy U.S. military surveillance videos that were officially released in 2020, and in the wealth of amateur UFO video that has flooded the web for decades. And maybe that’s why the reaction to Trump’s document dump has been surprisingly quiet. The hovering craft are real; it’s just not clear that they’re from anywhere but Earth. And then there’s all the footage you can now see on X of extraterrestrials (in U.S. military compounds, in operating theaters), which to my eyes is clearly not real, yet it’s all become part of the mythology.

A lot of that mythology descends from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the great Spielberg alien-visitation drama from 1977 that established its director, two years after “Jaws,” as our cinematic pop poet of the otherworldly. “Close Encounters” was a movie of true wonder, of jaw-dropping spectacle, of earthly religious rapture. And it had a major impact. Is it a coincidence that to this day just about every image you see of an alien — in drawings by people who claim to have been abducted by them; in “documentaries” — looks, more or less, like the extraterrestrial who appeared at the end of “Close Encounters”? Methinks not.

Back then, Spielberg’s vision was leading the culture. But now that we’ve reached “the age of disclosure,” when more and more people are convinced that alien visitations are real and that they’re being covered up by the government, I think what audiences want from “Disclosure Day” is to be led, once again, into a brave new world of revelation and belief.  

This time, however, Spielberg seems to be not so much leading as following the decades of lore and mythology — and gobbledygook — that his movie of 49 years ago helped inspire. “Disclosure Day” turns out to be a lavishly intense chase thriller with a dollop of deep-think rumination and two characters at its center whose own close encounters have shaped their lives and destinies. Scene for scene, the movie is a vigorous and diverting ride. Yet coming after the mountains of real UAP footage we’ve seen, “Disclosure Day” never gives you the contact high of awe that “Close Encounters” did. It’s closer to “Alien Autopsy” with better lighting, or perhaps a Special Edition of “The X-Files.” If you think aliens are real and that they have visited us (or even if, like me, you don’t), or if you just watch a lot of this stuff on YouTube, you may feel a step ahead of the movie’s vérité sci-fi world.

“Disclosure Day” opens in media res, with a pro wrestling match shot in jarring POV close-up, because that’s the arena where Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a nervous-looking cybersecurity expert, is making a hand-off under duress. (His girlfriend has been kidnapped.) Danny is a whistleblower (not unlike Edward Snowden), who has in his possession the complete archive of America’s footage of alien encounters, going back to the Roswell incident of 1947. He thinks the moment has come for the world to know the truth. At the same time, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a TV-news weatherperson in Kansas City, Missouri, undergoes a remarkable change after a cardinal flies into the loft she shares with her hipster partner, Jackson (Wyatt Russell). All of a sudden, she can speak any language. She becomes telepathic, to the point that she doesn’t seem to be reading people’s minds so much as inhabiting their souls. And on air, she suddenly starts “talking” in a series of mysterious clicks — which Danny alone can understand.

Both characters are being pursued by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), Danny’s boss at the Wardex Corporation, which since 1973 has been overseeing and documenting the U.S.’s top-secret alien research program. (It’s a private corporation so that the funds can remain untraceable; even the U.S. president is cut out of the loop.) Scanlon is played as a sinister clampdown type, but his rationale is that if the evidence ever did get out, it would cause chaos and a kind of global breakdown. Interestingly, Danny’s girlfriend, the good-hearted Jane (Eve Hewson), who first hides him in a monastery where she was once a novitiate, agrees with Scanlon. She thinks that if the revelation of alien encounters were allowed to leak out, it would destroy humankind’s relationship with God.

“Disclosure Day” has a fair amount of heady discussion on these matters, and while it’s nice to see a mainstream thriller aim high, the debates still function mostly as a suspenseful delaying tactic. The conspiracy aspect — the fact that the U.S., in the movie, has been covering all this up for 79 years — is, in a certain way, a red herring. For about an hour, Spielberg orchestrates “Disclosure Day” as a hurtling cat-and-mouse action movie, with Danny poised between the dark Scanlon and the saintly Hugo (Colman Domingo), another Wardex defector. But David Koepp’s script introduces complicating factors, like a piece of alien hardware Scanlon holds in his hand so that he can teleport and jump into people’s minds. And Danny and Margaret share a secret that goes back to a trauma she experienced in the ’90s, when she was 10. The flashback to this incident is both a little too mystical and a little too literal.

Spielberg, as part of the film’s publicity, has suggested that he believes in alien visitations, and that he’s an advocate for disclosure. But where “Close Encounters” tapped into the mystery of all this with an innocence that was both starry-eyed and spectacular, “Disclosure Day” feels like a thriller docudrama that’s too cut-and-dried about what it believes. The actors are quite good (especially Blunt, who makes you feel she’s seeing the uncanny), but for all the film’s slow build it doesn’t take us anywhere overly surprising. It just confirms the “truth” that’s been out there for so long it’s starting to feel like a fairy tale for the dispossessed.