Easy enough to call Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day his reworking retelling reboot of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film so elegantly worked out on the big screen you can recall most shots as being not just effortlessly lyrical but inevitable, locking in place to present a vast sound and light show, a once in a lifetime rock concert burnt into your brain the way the shape of Devil's Tower is burnt into Roy Neary's.
Disclosure is a different creature flavorwise. Spielberg's visual grammar (using his present favorite cinematographer Janusz Kaminski) has grown more sophisticated, his color palette more complex and mutedly realistic, his editing chops (with the relatively unfamiliar Sarah Boshar) if anything more daringly intricate. But that wide-eyed spirit is still there, for better or worse, that willingness to lift one's head up and look around to check if there's someone really out there.
(WARNING: plot and twists discussed in explicit detail!)Spielberg starts the film off at fifty miles an hour, opening on a tense confrontation between Wardex executive Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) and former Wardex cybersecurity expert Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), where Kellner is about to trade his store of stolen thumb drives for his girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson)-- or would have, if Kellner hadn't brandished a mysterious handsized rod, roughly the size shape and color of a Black and Decker wifi joystick. Scanlon is suitably intimidated and Kellner makes off with the bagful of McGuffins and the girl.
The ensuing chase-- the whys and wherefores of it, the way screenwriter David Koepp weaves in the parallel story of TV weathergirl Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) and her sadsack clearly out of his league boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell, son of Kurt and Goldie Hawn) and the narrative thread of fellow Wardex defector Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) who like Scanlon looks at the big picture as if gazing down at a widescreen videogame display is arguably Spielberg at his late-career best. It's taut, it hurtles along for much of its running time at roughly the same velocity as in its opening, it's full of visually inventive setpieces like the car-and-train crash the director has been dreaming of staging and shooting since his TV movie Duel and, as noted earlier, if it doesn't have the fabulist air of Close Encounters it does juggle so many more elements with a deftness and ambition not quite seen since O I don't know Minority Report or Munich. And director and filmmaker make capital on recent imagery that recalls ICE agents with state of the art surveillance tech, listening and looking everywhere, swooping down on and brutalizgin illegals (and citizens who support said illegals) at the slightest excuse.
Of the cast Emily Blunt does most of the heavy lifting keeping us on her side as her character literally changes from scene to scene moment by moment, as government and rebel and extraterrestrial forces flex to influence her mind, to varying degrees of success. Colman Domingo is the other outsized presence, all warmth and acceptance without much self-consciousness, but lemme point out the MVP in all this: Colin Firth, who suffers physically and emotionally almost as much as Blunt's character does (it adds texture to his determination to catch her that he's willing to undergo the risk), and whose softspoken menace is so silky smooth you keep underestimating him till he bares (at precisely chosen moments) his fangs, his character only betrayed in its arc towards the end, when he literally goes limp. Between Scanlon and a cartoon xenophobe like Stephen Miller I find Scanlon much more interesting.
Side note on the prominence of nuns and Roman Catholic imagery-- interesting Spielberg would focus not just on Christians but on this particular branch of Christianity; bet you Kellner and Blankenship haven't even gone to bed together (you get that vibe between em), Blankeship presumably saving herself for marriage. Why Catholics? Why nuns? Why not throw in an imam or rabbi as well? Is Spielberg suggesting we're more open to the idea of extraterrestrials? Maybe maybe.
Film is not without flaws-- folks have pointed out the CGI animals which seem to have wandered in from Bambi and The Little Prince respectively and the power of the kids' abduction sequence is diluted by John Williams at his worst, using his considerable stringpulling powers to soften the double kidnapping into what amounts as an unsettling dream (when young Daniel (Tyler Renaud) starts to panic young Margaret (Delaney Cuthburt) takes his hand soothingly in hers and Williams raises the soundtrack volume to reassure everyone that everything is peachy keen and these kids are in no danger whatsoever).
Would also like to point out a missed opportunity, as Spielberg belatedly suggests Scanlon and Wakefield are two sides of the same coin; wished he and Koepp had fleshed out their relationship a bit more, give it a similar dynamic to what Charles Xavier had with Erik Lehnsherr.
Maybe my biggest problem with this film and its concept of extraterrestrials touches on the core nature of aliens: how can we really know they are friendly? Scanlon never mentions it, none of his team talk about it (they speak of the danger of political and social instability); Wakefield for his part never pleads for the truth of his case or belief, and most of all newcomers Fairchild and Kellner never raise the possibility. I suppose there are hints and suggestions-- in seventy years the aliens never once retaliated (but how do we know that?) or killed anyone or even-- apparently-- performed a colonoscopy with malevolent intent-- but should we be entrusting our entire future to hints and suggestions? How do we know it isn't some great elaborate deception to win our trust? Yes the film's great theme is empathy, but shouldn't there be a debate, an argument, at least a discussion on the subject? Maybe make the moment when we find out for sure the climax of the film?
I ask because I suspect Spielberg and Koepp missed a golden opportunity to adapt a great science fiction story on this very subject, Damon Knight's 'Rule Golden,' about a man and an alien on the run with the government hot on their heels and the man unsure if he's helping save the world or destroy it. Suspenseful and surprisingly moving, with a piledriver of a conclusion involving not a single fist or even voice raised.
What we do have here is not nothing tho. Arguably the best film Spielberg's done since his sorely underrated West Side Story five years before, and before that either AI or The Lost World-- yes I have a weird pantheon of favorite Spielbergs, deal with it-- and arguably the best first-contact movie since O I don't know... The Thing? Starman? Soderbergh's Solaris is well made (nearly everything he does is) if uninspiring, and I have a sneaking fondness for 10 Cloverfield Lane and Frank Oz's Little Shop of Horrors remake... but yeah. Best first encounter movie since John Carpenter's* remake of the Howard Hawks classic.
*(Yes yes yes there's Carpenter's They Live... but that along with Nigel Kneale's Quatermass 2 and great Quatermass and the Pit I submit belong to that rarer genre of 'aliens have been with us all along' genre)
I do like that sudden cut to black. Robert Wise's classic The Day the Earth Stood Still went to great lengths to delay Klaatu's message to the world and after all that buildup what he ends up saying is something of an anticlimax ("We got our eyes on you--"). Spielberg knows he can't top what he's done so he leaves it as is, with maybe a note of foreboding behind it-- or more of a foreboding if he had added menace to what seems at least on the part of aliens a benign enterprise. Maybe not the best of the year, I'd call it one of the more interesting of the year, boxoffice (which is shaping up to be so-so, not likely to make its money back) be damned.
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