Back in December, I went on one of the bigger UFO subreddits — one that prides itself on some amount of rigor and usually bans posts about science fiction — and saw that the first trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day was on top of the front page. This speaks, somewhat, to the esteem that Spielberg is held in these communities, so much so that some posters believed this would be a part of actual disclosure, as in the US Government’s revelation to the public that extraterrestrial life is here, weird, and that we need to get used to it. On that front, I can say that they’ll be disappointed: The less-than-stellar title is there for a reason, with the emphasis placed on Day. The answers they seek are most likely fortified behind a Get Smart-like series of vault doors at Wright-Patterson AFB, guarded by squads of private contractors with Northrop-Grumman keycards. It’d be a shame for them to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though, as they’d be missing out on a feature that gets it, both in the moment and the message, for an expectation that never had a chance of being realized. Also, they’d ignore the fact that this is crackerjack entertainment — a thriller that deploys The Beard’s trademark sentiment as a kind of twist — as interesting and rich as Spielberg’s other alien features.
Each of these four* movies is an important cultural timestamp, both in the broad public sphere and in the insular UFO community. Close Encounters probably did more for establishing the idea of a “gentle exchange” first contact than any other piece of media, formulated as a direct response to childhood viewings of Invaders from Mars and other “invasion” pictures, and The Day the Earth Stood Still’s didacticism. It counted J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée as advisors, or at least their work, as influences, which gave it a certain amount of credibility with UFOlogists and was a counterweight to the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam malaise. E.T. followed that, emerging from a horror picture Spielberg quickly abandoned, and took a different approach. Compared to the genial conspiracy to conceal the landing at Devil’s Tower, the feds in that movie are downright evil, a portrayal which made kids cry and delighted both government-skeptical liberals and Reaganites.
I’ll spare you the glowing accolades, stories of teary viewings, and winsome explanation of the central metaphor,** as you’ve already read it. War of the Worlds came 23 years later, and entered a very different world, one where the government seemed powerless, and the tone became paranoid. Had Tom Cruise not derailed the press tour, or if the audience had been just an iota less cynical with regards to the film’s ending, I imagine it’d be more openly regarded as a classic, with its updated take on Wells’ anti-imperialist fable being about as perfect a summation of Bush-era foreign adventurism as one could hope.
Disclosure Day reflects everything that’s happened in the UFO sphere since then, and it has a dramatically different thesis about the role of government in this conspiracy. It has, in fact, nearly no role — like in the congressional testimony of whistleblower David Grusch, corporations are the stewards of this knowledge, the government reduced to nothing more than a pair of red-and-blue wrestlers going through the motions for our entertainment. This is, in fact, how Spielberg opens the film, gliding through the action and to the crowd, where a nervous young man sits clutching a backpack, unable to immerse himself in the action. He’s Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a gifted mathematics prodigy who is essentially what Ed Snowden might have been like had he stumbled onto files like the ones Nick Pope saw when he hacked the DoD and leaked images of cylindrical ships floating in low Earth orbit instead of information about spying programs.
Behind him sit several security personnel from Wardex, a powerful and secretive corporation headed by Noah Scanlan (Colin Firth), who really, really wants what’s in his backpack. They have his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), and he’s ready to make a deal. Of course, things go sideways for the Wardex goons, and Daniel and Jane escape with the goods and are assisted on the lam by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), another ex-employee who left to form an organization dedicated to bringing Wardex down. He and his fellow rebels are building a house in a very strange location, but, hey, it’s all a part of a grand plan.
Far away from all of this is Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a popular TV meteorologist in Kansas City who dreams of doing something better. She’s the lone, effervescent bright spot in a broadcast full of increasingly dark headlines — the US is already at DEFCON 2 at the film’s start, with conflicts in Europe and on the Korean Peninsula looking as if they’ll escalate into World War III — and yet she’s unsatisfied. She wants to be behind the anchor desk to report on the important things, and it’s during a breakfast-time conversation with her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), about her latest demo tape that a cardinal flies through her kitchen window, giving her a chance to become the story. It seems to hypnotize her, stimulating something deep within her unconscious mind, and after Jackson shoos off the bird, she resumes their conversation. In fluent Russian. When she’s stopped by a cop for speeding on her way to the studio, she seems to read the man’s mind, and amazes him into letting her go. And, as you’ve no doubt seen in the trailer, she has an on-air breakdown, frozen as she croaks and clicks for a solid two minutes. To the masses, this moment is just more meme fodder. To the knowledgeable, it appears to be post-stroke aphasia. To the people of Wardex, it’s a trade secret they’re willing to keep quiet. So begins her odyssey to that house Hugo and his men are building, where she’ll cross paths with Daniel and, perhaps, save the world.
What’s so interesting about the way Spielberg tells this story is how oddly yet satisfactorily he blends two disparate tones, deploying the sentiment he’s often stereotyped for as a genuinely unstable element in a dramatic shift that feels practically out of Twin Peaks: The Return. The first half is bleak. I’ve never been the world’s biggest fan of Janus Kaminski’s cinematography, but when you need a man to suck all of the color out of the frame, you hire him for this and not, you know, West Side Story. It feels one genetic mutation away from being the utterly hopeless world he and Spielberg depicted in Minority Report, with the forces of “good” being scattered and weak, and the forces of “evil” capable of mind control and in control of a private army. They’d rather let the world burn than spill their secrets, partially for economic reasons – revealing what they have would upend the markets and cause instability – and out of a long-buried sense of guilt. What O’Connor has in his bag isn’t the b-roll from Devil’s Tower; it’s a litany of sins, from torture to murder to… well, you get the point. Firth seems to be this ethos made flesh, so dedicated to preserving his power and fortune that he chooses to use a device that is steadily killing him to keep the whistleblower from going public. This is best captured in a superlative-worthy scene where he enters Hewson’s consciousness and interrogates her, exuding a tired menace, his irises alternating color as his influence over her waxes and wanes. It’s also got a bitchin’ car chase, made truly suspenseful by his ethereal presence – and the knife he’s gotten her to conceal in her shirt sleeve.
Yet Spielberg doesn’t see him as totally irredeemable. There was a reason this man fell into the abyss, and he’s supernaturally reminded of it. Firth beautifully conveys the effect this weaponized sentiment has on his character; you can see it all in his eyes — the longing, the disbelief, the hope — when he’s confronted by a TV meteorologist who wandered into his staging area and told him what he had to lose to get there. This power is what Blunt has to offer the world: she’s empathy personified, strong enough in her strange powers to make PMC contractors holding MP5s weep for those they loved with just a single glance. It’s terrific work from Blunt, too, having her own sort of Richard Dreyfuss breakdown when she’s activated, terrified of her own unfocused power, wishing she could just be normal. She makes Margaret seem three-dimensional, with O’Connor feeling like the vestigial element in a more focused thriller rather than her, even though he’s the one with the plot-heavy storyline. I guess that’s the mark of a truly brilliant performer: being able to sell a character dragged along by instinct, subject to forces beyond her control, endowing her with a sense of dynamism, perpetually moving towards a transformative ending. It’s no mistake that the color temperature warms to a pleasant tungsten when she’s at the center of the frame, or that the film takes on a gentler tone when she’s leading the story, after being united with O’Connor and Domingo.
Disclosure Day is in conversation with Close Encounters more than the other films, and its harsher tone is the product of his age – he’s seen enough of what evil exists in this world and knows what we’re capable of doing. The gentleness that defined first contact in that film is totally absent. The wonder is tempered by suffering, with the most magical moments presenting themselves to the characters (and us) as thinly veiled illusions, ultimately only half-remembered and partially processed. Yet a shared theme unites them – the possibility that, ultimately, man can become something greater; and I’d argue, somewhat, that this is the more forgiving film. Viewed from the perspective of its tertiary characters, Close Encounters is a tragedy – a father’s descent into madness leading to his ultimate disappearance from his children’s lives – while this story, ultimately, is about the revelation to and elevation of all humanity that there is something out there, willing, perhaps, to help us transcend the malefactors that stand in the way of transcendence.
Spielberg’s often talked about how he couldn’t write Close Encounters today, given how fatherhood changed his perspective, and I think Disclosure Day is ultimately that do-over. It doesn’t want to compete with its antecedent; it wants to serve as an addendum. If Close Encounters was a child’s wish for a troubled parent’s absolution, an imagined integer to complete the problem of what could possibly be greater than being with their family, Disclosure Day is an old man’s hopes for his grandchildren when he’s not around. It’s a prayer that they might glean the truth, learn from his generation’s mistakes, and make a more just and honest future in communion with wonderous forces beyond his imagination. All one has to do is listen.
* Not including his first film made with high school buddies, Watch the Skies, or AI, as those were robots, or Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, because the aliens aren’t really the point.
** I believe it was “Reese’s Pieces are fantastic.”