Director Steven Spielberg’s eye-popping new sci-fi drama about a decades-long government coverup of alien encounters
Disclosure Day
Starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth & Colman Domingo
Directed by Steven Spielberg
In theaters Friday, June 12
Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor take the leads in Disclosure Day, director Steven Spielberg’s new epic sci-fi thriller about the unraveling of a massive government conspiracy covering up evidence that we are not alone in the universe.
The top-notch cast also includes Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo and Wyatt Russell.
Blunt gives a performance that’s among her all-time best as Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist who suddenly develops amazing and alarming abilities, like speaking in foreign languages and reading minds. O’Connor is Daniel Kellner, a mathematics whiz turned whistle-blower determined to reveal what he knows about a covert global cybersecurity force that’s quashed nearly 80 years of proof about extraterrestrial “close encounters.”
They both become targets of a massive, rip-roaring manhunt to round them up and shut them down. What else do they have in common? Well, you’ll find out—but I won’t spoil it here.
Colin Firth is Noah Scanlon, the head of the coverup, convinced that the mind-blowing reality about aliens would “tip the balance” of a world already on the precipice of nuclear self-destruction. Eve Hewson (Bono’s daughter!) is Kellner’s girlfriend, a former novitiate in a monastery who plays a significant role in helping spread, well, another kind of word from on high. Colman Domingo, who makes almost every film he’s in better by just being in it, is the head of the movement to rip open decades of secrecy, to have a reckoning, a day of disclosure when the truth will be made known to everyone. Wyatt Russell is Jackson, Margaret’s romantic partner, who doesn’t understand—at least at first—what’s going on.
Spielberg, who launched the very idea of “summer blockbusters” back in 1975 with Jaws, has made some of the top-performing, most widely beloved and critically lauded movies of all time. Sometimes it feels here, with his first film in four years (since The Fablemans), that he’s looking into the skies and beyond the way he did in E.T. The Extraterrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind—with awe, empathy and hope.
And the soundtrack, by his longtime collaborator John Willams, drives home the gamut of emotions. It’s no wonder Williams has received more than two dozen Grammys and five Oscars.
Disclosure Day has it all—thrills and chills, danger and derring-do, and the beating heart of a love story. It’s got a pulse-pounding train scene that can match anything Tom Cruise has done in the Mission: Impossible world, and its heady thoughts on how the existence of extraterrestrials might mesh with the Bible will certainly stir some discussion. (Plus, three main characters are named Noah, Margaret and Daniel.)
Its suggestion that communication with aliens is closely aligned with music, mathematics and nature will likely mean you’ll never look at that bright red cardinal at your bird feeder, or on your windowsill, the same way again. It’s a movie that makes you think about what’s up here, what’s down here, and how it might all be connected. About childhood and crop circles, secrets and lies, the past and the future, and the multi-faceted experience of our very existence.
Spielberg has crafted another cinematic triumph, a moving picture that’s moving in more ways than one, one that reminds us again of the eye-popping, jaw-dropping magic and the majesty of a big story playing out on big screen, pulling us in, making us feel. Head down to the multiplex, folks, because it certainly feels like blockbuster time again.
—Neil Pond