They Encounter Them

Full disclosure: I haven’t always been the biggest fan of the Steven Spielberg filmography, often finding his work on the slick and smarmy side, as a popcorn-y auteur who found his way into the mainstream heart of the mass movie-going audience through post-Disneyesque maneuvering and sharp craft. There have been many exceptions and bright moments along the way in his now-fifty-something-year career, in my humble view, including the scene with David Lynch as John Ford in The Fabelmans, the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan, and the sci-fi aplomb of Minority Report.

And now, also along the sci-fi highway, but laced with Close Encounters of the Third Kind–ly optimism comes Disclosure Day, bolstered by many high points amidst the low eddies. Essentially, this well-made sci-fi thriller lays out a brink-of-WWIII scenario in which ETs are more benevolent and human-life-affirming than scary, akin to Spielberg’s earlier alien feel-good flicks ET and Close Encounters and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, then Tim Burton’s satirically sinister Mars Attacks (“Don’t run, we are your friends!”).

Leave it to Spielberg to inject some positive spirit into the general public at a time when earthly life — and Trump-sullied American life — is in desperate need of hope and emotional anchoring. Unfortunately, our appreciation for the almost secular/spiritual boosterism of his message is counteracted by certain moviegoers’ reservations about the film. For starters, it is a two-hour movie wrapped in a bloated three-hour package, as its central story repeatedly detours into gratuitous chase scenes and cat-and-mouse action-film antics. (One chase scene for the books is the genuinely, nail-bitingly exciting scene in which car meets train and protagonists nearly meet an early demise).

In the complex and plausibility-challenging plot, cooked up by Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp, our heroes — the frazzled but determined cybersecurity genius Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), weatherperson turned psychic “passenger” Margaret Fairchild (vividly played by Emily Blunt), and former nun Jane Blakenship (Eve Hewson) — are on an important renegade mission to enlighten the world about universal solidarity and the importance of empathy on a cosmic scale. But their journey is peskily thwarted by an evil repressive force led by Colin Firth. To an unintentionally comic effect, the story is punctuated by the unwelcome arrival of a posse of pursuers: “Oh no,” we think, “there’s that menacing convoy of threatening black vehicles, ruining another day and secret location.”

In the periphery and later towards the philosophical center of the story, Colman Domingo brings his thespian grace to the role of good guy team director Hugo Wakenfield, who points out that “empathy is the foremost value” for humans, and that “we have an essential need to believe.” Later, a kingpin ET reduces it further: “Listen.” John Williams supplies another in a long line of ideally suited musical scores for Spielberg’s cinematic thinking and messaging, and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński brings his insightful eye to the storytelling mission at hand. 

By the film’s would-be epiphanic finale, we half-expect Williams to paraphrase his iconic five-note alien theme from Close Encounters. And once even the notion of that earworm enters our mind, it’s hard for some of us to avoid recalling Bill Murray’s hilarious lounge singer skit on SNL, in which he suavely croons, “I encounter you, you encounter me, Close Encounters theme.” 

As with that paradoxical pairing, Disclosure Day nuzzles up in a space somewhere between true emotion and accidental kitsch. It’s a Spielberg specialty.

Disclosure Day is currently playing in multiple theaters in town. See trailer here.