It was certainly inevitable that Steven Spielberg, after the most enviably productive career of any American film director in history, would try to summarize that career in various ways as he approached his 80s. His last movie was the highly enjoyable, fiercely autobiographical The Fabelmans, one of his best, and now he’s dropped Disclosure Day, a capper to his various sci-fi works that envisioned mankind coming into contact with extraterrestrial species, and while it isn’t one of his worst, it really feels like an over-earnest attempt to make his obsession with outer space aliens make sense. Some critics have already made a connection between the two movies, saying that the kind of broken family narrative that Spielberg lived through as an adolescent informed his outlook on so-called messianic aliens (the ones in The War of the Worlds pointedly excepted) and the possibilities that their arrival could lead to a healing of all human suffering. After sitting through Disclosure Day‘s whiplash-inducing plot turns, it’s an easy theory to get behind.

The premise of the movie is obvious from the beginning: the U.S. government is hiding from the world evidence of extra-terrestrial visits. The central prophet in this story is a Kansas City weather reporter, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), who starts acting weird on air at about the same time news outlets are reporting on the world tumbling into World War III. Margaret starts speaking languages she doesn’t know and having visions that set her on the same path as Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a former government contractor who has stolen some secret data from his old boss with the intention of exposing the existence of aliens to the general public. Daniel’s girlfriend is a former nun (Eve Hewson, Bono’s daughter, by the way, which adds subtext that’s just too rich) who risks her life to help Daniel’s cause, the greatest threat to which is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), a private defense contractor whose business and, it would seem, very existence depends on the secret remaining buried. 

Spielberg’s special skills are exercised to the max, especially in the many tense and riveting action set pieces that often feel as if they’d been staged for their own sake rather than for advancing the plot, which gets seriously hairy at some points. Though it’s easy to understand and even sympathize with the director’s belief in alien salvation—David Koepp’s script is one of the few Spielberg has directed that’s based on his own story—in the end the movie feels almost self-referential, as if it were built backwards from the climax, which, like most Hollywood product, doesn’t offer many clues as to what may happen beyond the timeframe of the movie; and I’m not sure if that was Speilberg’s intention. He really yearns for those alien saviors and will obviously feel really let down if he doesn’t live to meet any. This is probably the closest he’ll get.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Disclosure Day home page in Japanese

photo (c) Universal Studios