Disclosure Day
A boomer’s hopeful, naive dream in the power of moving image-based media.
Steven Spielberg is back. His name might not be quite the discourse driver and box-office money printer it once was, but the most consequential American filmmaker of the last century has returned with another science-fiction film, “Disclosure Day”—an intelligent and stunning apology for truth-telling and empathy spoiled by excessive sentimentality and a naive boomeristic understanding of media culture.
Despite being about aliens, “Disclosure Day” actually has little to say about extraterrestrial life. It’s more curious about how humans would respond to the discovery of alien life. An elusive and stressed Josh O'Connor plays a cybersecurity specialist turned corporate whistleblower named Daniel Kellner. David Koepp’s screenplay treats the stolen information like a Shyamalan-esque twist, pretending as if the title and marketing didn’t already reveal the twist: a mega-company with government contracts named Wardex has kept alien life a secret for 79 years, and Kellner decides the entire world deserves to know that we are not alone.
The film starts in media res of Wardex’s manhunt for Kellner. The shroud of secrecy around the stolen proprietary information adds little suspense and no mystery since the reveal has already happened for the audience. Emily Blunt, meanwhile, taps into new emotive depths as Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist, who has a psychological breakdown and starts speaking an alien language on live television. Margaret and Daniel's stories intertwine with governmental secrets, aliens and a tragic shared past.
“Disclosure Day” is a fascinating epistemological dive into our post-truth world. The science-fiction cliché that the discovery of alien life will change our understanding of life is usually limited to the world of clichés and remains thematically underdeveloped. In Spielbergian fashion, this leading question gets personified through Margaret and Daniel as the former’s sanity is pushed to a breaking point and the latter’s brush with the truth moves him to moral action. Their relationship to knowledge actually changes course upon learning the truth, and the truth changes them.
As expected, the film looks and sounds slick. As has been the case since 1993, Spielberg teams up with cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, their joint sensibilities always find the most expressive lighting for a given scene. Sometimes a ray of light penetrates the dark, or hard backlights make characters glow effervescently to evoke the mystery of the supernatural (or extraterrestrial). Other times, the exact place a shadow falls communicates dark intent. Spielberg’s lighting is immaculate like a Vermeer painting.
The 94-year-old John Williams still has his touch. His 30th collaboration with Spielberg is the most original soundtrack the composer has produced in decades. The orchestration is subtle and striking at the same time. The piano, brass and even synths take a backseat to a musical deployment of silence. Williams has made a career out of putting the right notes together; in “Disclosure Day,” he is at his best in the refrains. The track “negotiation…” simmers into silence or near silence about every 20 seconds, and even without images to accompany it, the pauses thematically shift the titular negotiation from one party to the other. The track titles on the official soundtrack are single words, lowercase and followed by an ellipsis, for example, “empathy…”, a fitting way to signify the score’s simplicity and obvious motifs.