Not another Disclosure Day review

Review by Blake Collier for FATE

There is something in the air surrounding the release of Steven Spielberg’s latest alien-centric science fiction film. Perhaps it’s the last few years of Congressional hearings and the last few weeks of tranches uploaded by the Dept. of War under the dictates of Donald Trump. Regardless, there is an almost electric ambience around the arrival of this film. It seems likely that it will become a cultural marker for the times.

But is it good?

That question is multifaceted with any movie, but because of this one’s social import and the general admiration for its director, gauging its quality as a film is worthwhile to see if it’s able to rise to our specific cultural moment.

Disclosure Day tells the parallel narratives of Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) and Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) as they are ripped from their normal lives as a Kansas City TV meteorologist and an ex-con turned cybersecurity specialist, respectively, and ushered into a race to disclose stolen video evidence from the last 70+ years of UFO sightings, crashes, government cover-ups and retrieved alien bodies. This evidence somehow found its way into the hands of Wardex, a private defense contractor called run by CEO Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). How this information was acquired is not disclosed, but if we take a good hard look at the current American political climate, it isn’t hard to connect the narrative dots that were probably going through the mind of screenwriter David Koepp.

The remainder of the film is a fairly uneven attempt at moving the story along with chases and side character manipulation (through alien tech) by the head of Wardex as he and his goons attempt to stop worldwide Disclosure. We also watch the emotional narratives of our two main protagonists unfold as they come to terms with the revelation that they are both experiencers.

The former storyline is probably what the public visualizes when they think of Disclosure, especially in light of the mainstreaming of UAP/UFO theory and belief in the last decade. The latter, it seems, is the narrative most likely to resonate with those who have experienced contact events themselves and have spent most, if not all, of their lives being dismissed by institutions under the guise of scientific, rationalist, and materialist inquiry—a legacy inherited from the Enlightenment and the capture of neoliberal interests.

Meredith Spearman describes what actual Disclosure would look like in her terrific breakdown of its history and theoretical framework in “What to Expect When You’re Expecting Disclosure” at The Maze to Metanoia:

“Disclosure is not going to arrive as a press conference. It will arrive as the official story becoming increasingly difficult to maintain; Reframed language, controlled releases, jurisdictional disputes between agencies, and a growing gap between what credentialed insiders are saying publicly and what the official record acknowledges. Ambiguity will persist not because nothing is known, but because different institutions know different things and none of them want to be the one holding the explanation when it lands.”

In many ways, Disclosure Day plays into the typical tropes of how most of us envision a full disclosure event. Instead of a press conference, Spielberg and Koepp give us an updated globalized “Breaking News” segment. The government and the military are largely nonentities within this film. The only two agencies of import involve a made-up private corporation (patterned after the likes of Blackwater, etc.) and legacy television media, but at no point is there confusion or disputes over jurisdiction. Spielberg and Koepp are basically re-telling All the President’s Men in the age of UFOs.

It is often hard to tell what the film prizes most: its penchant for third-tier Michael Bay-inspired action set pieces or its Spielberg-ian humanist platitudes.

There might be moments where Blunt and O’Connor’s characters hit something that rings out as natural emotion, but most of the time they settle for an untethered archetype of an experiencer rather than something grounded in humanity and a certain locale and time.

Watching Koepp and Spielberg’s version of an experiencer brought to mind a lesser-known, but much better indie film from last year that was produced by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead titled Descendent. In this film, an LA school security guard sees a strange light in the sky one night, passes out, and wakes up the next day with memories and hallucinations that follow in line with the stories told by Whitley Strieber in his nonfiction book Communion. The main character in Descendent is very grounded and realistically played. His fear, his confusion, and his complete inability to grapple with his experience is palpable and visceral throughout the runtime. We get to see its effect on his home life as his wife prepares to have their first kid. At no point was there a level of care taken with Disclosure Day’s protagonists to bring the audience into what would have been life-altering nature of contact events.

There were variants of Disclosure Day that would have made for fascinating cinematic studies. Instead of focusing on the act of wresting the information from para-governmental corporations and bringing it to the world, the film could have—more in line with the elucidations of experiencers like Meredith Spearman—started with an undeniable mass disclosure event and explored the chaos that ensues as humanity reconstructs the reality they once knew on individual, social, and institutional levels.

Or maybe the film could have focused more intently on the lives of experiencers as they reconcile their contact event against the near-universal institutional denials.

In fact, Spielberg et al. could have simply made a film where extraterrestrial visitors communicated with all of humanity at the same time(more in line with 2016’s Arrival), leaving us to contend with whether we trust the information that proceeds from the lips (or telepathic minds) of these visitors.

Any of these might have allowed the film to earn the cultural significance bestowed upon it and spoken more clearly to our times—an era in which individual realities are fracturing apart from each other without extraterrestrial causes.

However, Spielberg and Koepp chose artificial glosses over speaking into our current moment. Given the opportunity to experiment portray the “ontological shock” that Disclosure is constantly threatening, they, instead, chose spectacle—one that kept its viewers at arm’s length instead of ushering them into the fringes where they might question their very existence.

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