Certain beliefs unite all of humanity. Take, for example, the idea that the extraordinary is possible. Or, even more, that the impossible is possible. Steven Spielberg isn’t shy about believing in extraterrestrial life, and he doesn’t think you should be either. He’s so sincere about this aloof-yet-sky-high-stakes concept that he’s returning to it again with a very simple profundity in tow: “Empathy is the core of animate existence–our evolutionary advantage.” And he intends to remind us of our capacity for such.
It feels almost as if the high-society, global-elite side of Spielberg is trying to tell us something. But, in reality, it’s a subject he’s been fascinated with his whole life. That’s why his first feature, 1964’s Firelight, dealt with the existence of aliens. As would Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and War of the Worlds (and, debatably, Minority Report). He even worked an “aliens exist” plotline into his fourth entry in the Indiana Jones franchise, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But there’s something more intimate about Disclosure Day, the director’s first legitimate sci-fi film since 2005’s War of the Worlds and his second in the past twenty years next to the IP slop that was Ready Player One.
Spielberg—who has only written stories or screenplays for three of his films since Close Encounters in 1977—is coming off writing his most private film yet, The Fabelmans, and apparently still has the writing bug. As the progenitor of the story, he brings that highly personal angle to Disclosure Day as if it’s autobiographical (it isn’t, of course), but handed the project to longtime collaborator David Koepp to shape up the snappy final screenplay, which sings with a particular yet universal voice. As for what is being disclosed: the secret isn’t so secret as you think. It’s exactly what it seems. A quick watch of any of the most recent trailers will tell you. But there are still smaller secrets and further fascinating details in its larger extraterrestrial reveal.
We enter Disclosure Day after the chase has already begun. A shady handoff of some sort is taking place. How, why, and what is being given over remains a mystery. A scrawny, silent, sleepy-eyed Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) looms in the crowd of a wrestling match, a Julian Assange type on the run after stealing WARDEX secrets, which he plans on trading for the captured Jane (Eve Hewson), his ex-novitiate girlfriend who’s been inadvertently dragged into Danny’s inevitably world-changing decision to disclose the secrets WARDEX has paid him to protect. She lost her calling as a nun; he found his as a deep-state cybersecurity data analyst.
The villainous Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) sits atop the cryptic agency in pursuit of Danny and Jane, speaking with an efficient coldness as he directs his pawns into frenzied action and uses alien technology to transcend space as we know it. In the background of this recognizable modern America, World War III builds, ominously and believably, into chaos sans explanation, Spielberg using this framing device to show just how much more important the secrets being revealed are.
All of this said, Danny takes a back seat to Kansas City weather broadcaster Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt in her best role since Sicario and a role finally befitting her talent for the first time in six years), who leads the thriller with comedic and awe-inducing reverent tones in balance. Maggie is in a life phase where no thing or place feels right. She’ll know she’s in the right spot once she’s there, but Kansas City isn’t it. A relationship with Jackson (a very funny Wyatt Russell that I couldn’t help but imagine Tim Robinson playing even better) isn’t either. After a peaceably strange encounter with a cardinal, Maggie mysteriously inherits the ability to communicate across languages and see into people’s hearts, minds, and personal histories with nothing more than meaningful eye contact. Her inexplicable foresight is reminiscent of Agatha’s hair-raising supernatural prescience with a stranger in the mall in Minority Report: “He knows. Don’t go home.”
From there, Danny and Maggie slowly gravitate towards each other and a different story, one I’ll leave for discovery, unfolds. There’s a chilling gravity to Disclosure Day that makes the weight of what’s happening suggest you’re carrying something that simultaneously clocks in at twenty tons and is light as a feather—a spine-tingling existential sensation that something much bigger than us, some Great Unknown, awaits.
It’s been 49 years since Spielberg blew the top off the future-bent genre that is science fiction with Close Encounters. Are these the aliens we met then, simply covered up? It could be. They have that same skinny, gray alien look with classic dressing: big, black, vacuous eyes, two nostrily holes where a nose would be, a rounded upside-down triangle head, stubby-long fingers. They’re so stereotypical (see: alien iPhone emoji) that the images we see of them aren’t supposed to shock us. It’s their existence that should.
In a way, it’s our own existence that should shock in equal measure. That faith in humanity marks the biggest difference in Spielberg’s sci-fi film in comparison to his others. As a whole, it looks little like the rest of his sci-fi pictures while still having a familiar modern Spielberg and Janusz Kamiński aesthetic; their 21st feature in 33 years is defined by a bevy of colorful lens flares and a slight silvery-blue edge that characterizes the otherwise bright-white cinematography. The duo’s camerawork is as acrobatic as ever, Spielberg never having lost his taste for kinetic, dynamic movement that sucks you into the story he’s telling. And that’s imperative in a film that begs you to believe in more than yourself.
There’s a religiosity to Disclosure Day, almost as if Spielberg is evangelizing, à la Tom DeLonge, his position on the matter, his belief that aliens do exist. He identifies more as “an ambassador” for the aliens he believes in. As silly as it might seem, it somehow means more coming from Spielberg than it does others. Much like the concept behind Eyes Wide Shut meant more coming from Kubrick, someone who undoubtedly brushed shoulders with the scene, if he wasn’t invited directly into it. One likewise can’t help wondering what the globally beloved, President-meeting, New York high-society-navigating, culturally and politically powerful savant filmmaker has encountered behind the scenes that makes him so sure of himself–a Disclosure Day conspiracy of our own to chew on.
Back to what we do know, though: in earnest, Spielberg takes the position of both the conspiracy theorist and the church, sincerely appealing to Western faith traditions across the world to believe aliens exist in conjunction with God. “Why would He make such a vast universe, yet save it only for us?” the nun asks her wisdom-seeking ex-novitiate (i.e., Spielberg asks the average Christian). He welds his probing ontological questions to a big-tech conspiracy that everyone can have fun with in the 21st century, an institutional conspiracy everyone can relate to, and an existential conspiracy arguably even more relatable. And it’s all bound with the rope of a thriller, a chase film, and a grounded phenomenological, spiritual, and linguistic exploration of extraterrestrial discovery.
Disclosure Day thus quickly becomes about finding our purpose, about the fresh-eyed light of discovery, about the ethics of holding and disclosing cosmological secrets. Who has the right to share? Who has the right to know? According to Spielberg, everybody. The director believes we’re all meant to live into our purpose, no matter how hefty or insurmountable it might feel. Even Noah quotes Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane (“Let this cup passeth over me…”) as he tries to stop Danny.
As to be expected from any Spielberg blockbuster we’re lucky to get, amazing set pieces abound, like a car ramming through the wall of a house, only to exit the house by speeding through the other side in a spectacular, sprinting shot that frames the vehicle from the front as it escapes. John Williams, as is also to be expected, delivers a terrific score, one that exemplifies the effectiveness of their collaboration over the decades. Colman Domingo is marvelous as Hugo Wakefield, an ex-WARDEX sage shrouded in as much secrecy as the secrets themselves.
In short, Disclosure Day is another Spielberg blockbuster triumph, a welcome return to the genre he’s always been best at, and a genuinely spine-tingling, soul-searching experience that leaves us wondering less about aliens and more about how we can learn to listen to, understand, and have empathy for each other.
Disclosure Day opens in theaters on Friday, June 12.