Ticketworthy! - Disclosure Day

When a prolific filmmaker like Steven Spielberg, a titan in the industry, comes up with an idea, studios are going to throw money at it without question. That’s the nature of the business. He’s created some of the most iconic movies of all time. He has almost two dozen Academy Award nominations. He made Jurassic Park. That is a hard director to say no to. If Disclosure Day is any indication, though, maybe it’s time for somebody to give it a try.

For some reason, the story of Disclosure Day picks up with events already in motion. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a brilliant cybersecurity analyst, has stolen valuable information from Wardex, a shady government organization that is hiding the truth from the world. That truth is, of course, aliens. Kellner and his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson) must team up with Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a TV meteorologist with psychic powers, to avoid Wardex and show the world that we are not alone in the universe.

Let me start by saying that I do not blame the acting for any of this movie’s problems. O’Connor, Blunt, and Hewson all give great performances despite their characters and the story making very little sense. Colin Firth is equally as enjoyable as the evil head of Wardex, a role that asks Firth to be menacing in a way we rarely see from him. He nails it. Across the board, the actors are doing their best with what they have. They just don’t actually have very much.

Where the movie falls apart is...basically everywhere else. The script feels obviously unfinished, more a collection of cool scenes and big ideas than an actual coherent narrative. There’s almost no logic to most of the story. Characters make choices and events occur not because they make sense, but because if they didn’t, the next big, cool thing wouldn’t happen. The number of times characters get out of sticky situations simply because the people after them let them go must be a record of some kind. There are at least three instances in the film where Wardex could have won, and they just...opt not to because I guess they remembered they’re the bad guys and that’s not how it’s supposed to go. It feels lazy.

The actual composition of the scenes isn’t much better. For most of the film, the camera work is, to put it politely, busy. I can’t recall the last time I noticed a camera moving around so much for no good reason. Sweeps, pans, and cuts are useful tools for showing perspective changes, but here they are repeatedly done just to avoid having the shot linger in one spot too long. It’s visual noise, and it’s annoyingly noticeable. When the camera does sit still, we’re treated to unnecessary lens flare, genuinely terrible CGI, and color design that hasn’t been clever in a few decades. Don’t worry about figuring out who the bad guys are, they’re the ones in all black whose every scene is bathed in blue and sterile white, so you know they are cold and unfeeling. The film doesn’t trust its audience to pick up even an ounce of subtlety.

I could go on about the issues with story structure, pacing, editing, and even sound design. All of it has plenty that deserves to be criticized. However, it might be easier to just say that the actual production and composition of Disclosure Day leaves a lot to be desired. This is not Spielberg’s finest work, even if I do sometimes see the vision. There are moments that work, and several of them really drew me in, but they are drowned out by the overwhelming number of problems. A few good ideas are not enough to fix what’s wrong with this movie.

Had Disclosure Day been made by an up-and-coming filmmaker, I might be a bit more forgiving. Technical issues are to be expected, and a newer director might not know yet how to navigate a poor script. That’s just not the case here. The mistakes and issues that plague the film are not easy to ignore when the director is as legendary and respected as Spielberg. As a whole, the movie isn’t a disaster, the big moments mostly work alright, and you might leave thinking you saw some cool things. Yet, underneath all of that, it is a mess that’s held together by hope and some stellar acting. That is the unfortunate secret of Disclosure Day, and like Wardex, the movie doesn’t do nearly enough to hide it.