Disclosure Day
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by David Koepp
Starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor and Colman Domingo
Classification PG; 146 minutes
Opens in theatres June 12
For about the first two-thirds of Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s new sci-fi conspiracy thriller, a honey-voiced man of mysterious authority named Hugo (Colman Domingo) spends his time calmly but meticulously overseeing the construction of a giant set inside the confines of an industrial warehouse. What Hugo is building and why he has employed a skilled crew of dozens to do it will become clear eventually. But in terms of understanding and unlocking Disclosure Day, Hugo’s role is no secret: He is, in design and purpose, the film’s very own Spielbergian avatar, measuring out the aesthetic space of a world and laying down its narrative bricks before our eyes.
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There is an exceptional confidence to Hugo – to his plan and his craft – which, were the character to be imagined by any other living director, would reek of hubris and self-aggrandizement. A riff on the old Orson Welles quote about a soundstage being “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had” taken too far. But because Hugo sits at the centre of a Spielberg film, and because so many of us have spent the past half-century viewing and processing pop culture through Spielberg’s lens, we can mostly forgive the many times it feels as if the character, and the film that surrounds him, is putting on a show for an audience of exactly one: Spielberg himself.
Colman Domingo plays Hugo, the film’s very own Spielbergian avatar.Niko Tavernise/The Canadian Press
Astounding in its visuals but solipsistic in its ideas, with brilliant performances that frequently grind up against a groaning narrative, Disclosure Day represents the very best and most frustrating elements of the Spielberg canon. It might be billed as the final answer to the question that has bedeviled the director over his entire lifetime – are we alone in the universe? – but the movie is stuffed with far more than the bits and (Reese’s) pieces of E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
There are aliens, yes, but this film is as much about the cosmos as it is about Minority Report’s fear of the surveillance state. Or The Post’s belief in the power of mass-market journalism. Or even Hook’s remedy to mend childhoods cut unfairly short. And so Disclosure Day plays exactly as one might expect the grand syllabus of Spielberg 101 to unspool. This is sincere, sloppy, magnificent stuff that will drive almost everyone absolutely nuts.
Josh O'Connor and Emily Blunt star in the film, which is full of astounding visuals but is ultimately hobbled by a weak narrative.Universal Pictures and Amblin En; Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment/The Canadian Press
The story, developed from an original idea by Spielberg drafted into screenplay form by his longtime collaborator David Koepp, is the root of the problem. Mostly: There isn’t one. Essentially one long chase, Disclosure Day revolves around too thinly sketched heroes of varying degrees of purpose who are trying to evade capture by malevolent forces for as long as possible. It is a mouse hunt, but one in which you sometimes side with the exterminator.
The first target we meet is Daniel (Josh O’Connor), a bland cybersecurity expert who has stolen a cache of government files from a shadowy military-industrial corporation called Wardex, whose digital arc of secrets has been under the care of a rather godly tech titan named Noah (Colin Firth). Daniel’s scheme to play Edward Snowden and leak the Wardex data to the world is complicated by the sudden appearance in his life of Margaret (Emily Blunt), a TV journalist who is able to read his mind, and everyone else’s, too.
As Daniel and Margaret dash from one end of the American Midwest to the other, it becomes increasingly clear that the pair shares a traumatic, partially forgotten past, one that might have been shaped by otherworldly forces. Cue the crop circles, whispers of a 1940s incident in Roswell, N.M., and an unnerving cadre of cartoonishly rendered CGI animals that look pulled from a Thomas Kinkade painting. What does it all mean? You only need to know the bare-bone basics of Spielberg’s extraterrestrial movies to figure it out. Or maybe you’ve seen an episode or two of The X-Files.
Perhaps aware that there aren’t all that many puzzles to solve in the film, Spielberg and Koepp background the alien action with the threat of global nuclear war, occasionally interrupting Daniel and Margaret’s antics with snippets from TV news reports in which anchors toss off mentions of “DEFCON 1″ and “North Korea.” This plot point, and the road it eventually takes, feels as if Spielberg is making his own misguided version of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, a property far too cynical for the director’s earnest tastes.
Blunt stars as a TV journalist Margaret.Niko Tavernise/The Associated Press
Meanwhile, overseeing Daniel and Margaret’s entire journey is Hugo, who might be taking more pleasure orchestrating the adventure via his cellphone headset than anyone else involved in the actual film, up to and including Spielberg’s regular collaborators John Williams (whose score frequently buckles when it should bend), cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (who engineers some of the most technically brilliant shots I’ve ever seen, but cannot resist washing out the world’s colours), and Koepp (who pockmarks the script with a dozen gaping plot holes and some of the most aggravating dialogue of his exceptionally checkered career, though he gets a bonus point for having someone incredulously utter the line, “Is this AI?”).
At its very best, which is not infrequently, Disclosure Day delivers the kind of eye-popping, heart-racing wonder that Spielberg has become synonymous with. A car chase through – not around, but through – a rural farmhouse is perfectly staged, while an extended single-shot sequence tracing Margaret through an especially bad morning in the newsroom is a marvelous synergy of balletic camerawork and delightfully playful performance on the part of Blunt (who gets to have way more fun than O’Connor).
There are invisible firetrucks and mind-control devices and teleporting henchmen and even a sequence in which an out-of-control car essentially gets into a fight with a speeding freight train – a clanging collection of gee-whiz toys that keeps Spielberg’s inner child from staying all that interior.
But all the fun and excitement must also sit uneasily along some distressingly thin characters, a handful of ultra-flat supporting actors (Eve Hewson is dreadful as Daniel’s religious girlfriend, while Wyatt Russell, typically entertaining in a frat-boy-gone-right kind of way, cannot get a handle on his thankless role as Margaret’s bewildered boyfriend), and an ending that will cause some in the audience to riot. Not unjustifiably, either.
By the time Disclosure Day lays bare all of its many secrets – which is the same moment Hugo finally relinquishes his own directorial control – it is clear that Spielberg is fulfilling a lifelong dream and having a hell of a time staging such a very close encounter. Everyone else, though, might feel a little left out. Alienated, even.