EMILY BLUNT, JOSH O'CONNOR IN DISCLOSURE DAY

Tell it all

The director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. has come back to the topic of aliens crabwise with Disclosure Day, a motion picture about (spoiler alert) not confronting the creatures from space but those who know about them and want to hide it, and someone who can't accept that. Neither vintage nor a disgrace, this Spielberg is a moderately good sci-fi action movie with much of the familiar but nothing of the iconic about it. If you're not a Spielberg completist or desperate to be at a mainstream movie in an actual theater now, you need not even go. This does show that at 79 the master still has some game, but how much and on what level we don't know.

Yes, the director is a proficient mainstream action filmmaker. He keeps the excitement flowing and has assembled a crack team. This includes David Koepp, the screenwriter, Janusz Kamiński, the dp, Sarah Broshar, the new editor, Cindy Tolan, the casting director, and John Williams, the composer. They are all doing good work but not making magic. (John Williams was cajoled back from retirement, and his effort seems half-hearted. Koepp and Spielberg may not have been thoroughly rigorous about the writing.) The work, however professional, is undermined by conventionality. One of the familiar gimmicks is that all this action on a grand scale happens as seen through a handful of people, and this leads to a certain one-dimensionality. Grand multiple screens (a too-familiar trope) of a giant central info HQ - in the better days of the Bourne movies the address line was "Langley, Virginia" - tell us that, as the movie arrives at its grand finale, such as it is, the secrets are being broadcast to TV stations (another classic - maybe passé? - trope) all over the United States and simultaneously around the globe.

Perhaps we should not think it too far fetched that it's one twitchy young man, Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor, robbed of elegance and wit), who is assigned the job of the universe's whistle-blower. After all, there was such a person, Edward Snowden, and Laura Poitras got an Oscar for making a movie about him. But while this feels like a movie that is just a little too talky for an action picture, somehow the issues don't get satisfyingly talked through. What we do get instead is byplay among the main characters. There's Noah Scanlon, the head of Wardex, a dicey international corporation, who's not too evil because he's played by Colin Firth. (All four actors playing the American main characters are British.)

When Scanlon finds out that Daniel, who's been hoarding and sorting alien-info for Wardex for years, has decided the whole human world must know, he sets out to rub the young man out. Daniel happens to be on the run with an innocent young woman called Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), a former nun, a fact about her that emerges to him when she takes them to a monastery where she did her novitiate, to hide. There's another "team," so to speak, led by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), a sort of good-guy Wardex exec who's, like Daniel, newly convinced that the company's long hidden alien-info (even back to Roswell NM!) must be made public. That the way the whole thing does finally suddenly become public seems wildly implausible may be silly and obvious to mention, but the filmmakers have gone a step too far here, and sometimes when things happen fast doesn't make them more convincing.

There is a separate story line, appropriately involving a TV personality, KCXE Kansas City's wiggly weather reporter (the prospect of a hailstorm makes her shimmy on camera with delight) Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), whom we first with her live-in boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell, little used). Margaret meets a red bird, or rather one comes in the window to visit her, and as an apparent result she (Margaret, not the bird) starts speaking Russian and Korean and, on air, a cluck language (clicks and 8-bit binary tones) that, miraculously, Daniel understands (he doesn't do Russian or Korean, though, but he was always good at numbers). Well, guess what (remember, I said Spoiler Alert): later on in the movie a flashback about Margaret rveals she and Daniel were both, shall we say, programmed early in life, but just didn't know it till now.

The final line is the extraterrestrial one, which perhaps for the first time (to my knowledge) runs hints of links between Nazi concentration camp victims and critters from other galaxies. This is because it seems a reason for the secrecy is that Wardex and government agencies have been seriously maltreating the E.T.s they've clandestinely been encountering with, over the years. How and why and where there's not time to tell, apparently because, the chase takes precedent. When it finally comes to it the (apparently obligatory final in-person Close Encounter is a serious disappointment. This Spielberg alien just looks so much like last year's. And Project Hail Mary's, just recently, decidedly didn't.

As I summarize this I begin to feel that Mr. Koepp and the director had more ideas than they knew what to do with here, and didn't know in what order to put them. The action flows energetically enough, as you would expect with a filmmaker of this caliber, partly using those big rooms with Langley-style screens and dozens of IT drones calling in information, partly with that much older tried and true method, a series of chase scenes using lots of fast cars with men in black baseball caps driving them. There is even an oldest-of-all early-movies classic sequence (not the kind you'll see at Sundance! - Way too expensive) of a car being dragged along by a whole railroad train while two of the lead characters climb around on it desperately, but ultimately successfully. And it works, this scene, just as it always does. There is also a nun, Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), who Daniel and Jane get to talk to at the monastery about God and whether there are other non-human Beings and What That Means.

But actually what all this Means is not something, for all the talk and all the action, that Spielberg and Disclosure Day satisfyingly get to, or whether the Edward Snowden thing is right or wrong this time. "Disclosure Day," by the way, really rocks in a generic way as a summer blockbuster movie title, but doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the film's action. And so whether or not the final message of the clicks from the other beings is "Listen," we don't get anything particular to listen to. If Disclosure Day watches well from minute to minute and scene to scene if, as in a tennis grand slam final the players are said to try to do, you studiously avoid thinking about what just went wrong and what hangs on the moments to come, the main fun of it is merely watching how Margaret the weather lady talks herself and her posse (including Daniel) through every government and corporate bar of secrecy, like talking Russian and Korean, by knowing, just for a minute, what's going on in everybody's head. It's like, human. We have to be glad that Margaret's kind of fairytale skill isn't actually granted to people. But, that nobody has that kind of manipulative skill, as in the Bourne movies (any one of which is better than this), it's fun to imagine being able to speak a bunch of hard languages all of a sudden, to get yourself through a tense situation.

Disclosure Day, 145 mins., premiered in Paris June 2, 2026 and opened in France June 10. US theatrical release June 12, 2026. Metacritic rating: 74%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.