Movie Review: ‘Disclosure Day’

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Disclosure Day is an epic sci-fi action thriller about humanity being told a theoretically universe-altering truth about the existence of aliens and the lengths some people will go through to keep the truth hidden. The movie has all the makings of a big summer blockbuster: it is directed by Steven Spielberg, has music by John Williams, features a fantastic cast with great character development, spectacular visual effects, and a thought-provoking storyline that is highly relatable. Given all of that, I found myself a bit underwhelmed by the climax and some of the generic action scenes, though I did enjoy the overall journey and would still highly recommend it.

The film follows two central characters, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) and Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor). Margaret is a meteorologist who begins to develop extraordinary abilities like telepathy and precognition. She becomes driven toward people, like Daniel, and events that she cannot fully understand, at first. Daniel works for private company, Wardex, and has defected with other Wardex employees to publicly reveal 70+ years of extraterrestrial evidence that Wardex has been concealing. He also has some extraordinary abilities although they are not as powerful as Margaret’s; he can understand an alien language as if it were English.

Margaret and Daniel are caught between the two opposing forces which put their lives in danger. Wardex, led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), is determined to stop Daniel and the group that he works with, led by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), from reveling the truth about the known existence of aliens. Wardex has a high-tech building, a security team that appears to be above the law, and access to potentially dangerous alien technology while Hugo and his team are building a full-size house in an empty warehouse and have a few people out in the field trying to retrieve Daniel and the backpack full of data that he protects.

Along for at least part of the ride are Margaret’s and Daniel’s significant others. Margaret’s boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), tries to go along with her seemingly unhinged state of mind, but his concerns try to direct her back to a hospital after they escape from people Margaret claims are not FBI agents that they claim to be. Meanwhile, Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane (Eve Newson) has religious concerns about revealing the truth given her history with a convent. Jane believes knowledge of the existence of aliens will invalidate religion and lead to humanity losing faith in God. Personally, I would be fine with religion fading into history and humanity progressing beyond the limitations it has placed on us. I understand that it helps some people in some circumstances, but I believe it has greatly held back our potential over the last few millennia.

The movie has grand ideas about humanity that kind of stretch believability more than aliens existing, and the debate about how humanity would react to extraterrestrials has always been fascinating. The action scenes were very well done and entertaining. I will admit I was a bit underwhelmed by certain elements, including the ending. The “bad guys” tended to give up too easily and (spoiler) when the truth is revealed, I don’t really buy that that is how humanity would react to such news (some people, sure, yes, but not everybody like it is presented in the film). I never saw Close Encounters, but I did find myself thinking about Spielberg’s Taken miniseries during a lot of the alien scenes in this film, even briefly thought Allie Keys might make an appearance. Overall, I enjoyed the movie and would recommend seeing it in theaters.