After pondering his early life in The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg seemed set, with this sprawling science-fiction yarn, for a return to the sparky matinee entertainment that helped make an adjective of his surname.
There is certainly a lot of Spielbergian fun to be had. Large parts of the film’s busy centre are taken up with chase sequences that nod frantically towards Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Emily Blunt, in a career-best turn, begins by offering us a practical tutorial in screwball comedy before moving on to something more creepily intense. He even finds space for a classic Disney song.
Disclosure Day is, however, arguably as concerned with gazing at the Spielberg navel as was the previous, more explicitly autobiographical film. What we have is a meditation on how an even more sinister – and somewhat more competent – incarnation of the US security apparatus might have responded to an alien presence that began with the alleged visitation to Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 (the year after Spielberg’s birth).
The film is therefore in unavoidable conversation with ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is gloomier and less sentimental than either. It is also much less focused and, particularly towards the close, hampered by lunges into the absurd.
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We begin with Josh O’Connor and our own Eve Hewson as Noah Scanlon and Jane Blankenship, two oddballs on the run from a menacing governmental body headed by the absurdly bad-tempered Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth in too much black). It quickly becomes clear that Noah, a whistleblower, is intent on revealing the state’s suppression of its engagement with the extraterrestrial community. He wants to get it all out there in one media blitz. A Disclosure Day if you will.
Jane, played with convincing intensity by Hewson, is there to ask practical questions on our behalf and, as a former novice nun, to allow meditation on a surprising number of religious quandaries. Could God love the alien as he loves the human? Can God still be necessary for a functioning society if he is not truly divine? Spielberg has spent a fair bit of his life with Martin Scorsese. Maybe that stuff rubs off.
The film really kicks into gear when we meet Blunt as the spirited TV weatherperson Margaret Fairchild. One odd day, she encounters a bird in her Kansas City apartment before, an hour or two later, slipping into percussive gibberish while broadcasting on the day’s precipitation. Suddenly, she can speak Russian. She knows strangers’ most intimate secrets. Soon she is making psychic connection with Noah.
There is an obvious parallel there with the communion between Richard Dreyfuss’s and Melinda Dillon’s characters in Close Encounters: all linked in sympathy with the alien consciousness. Despite being written in the wake of Watergate, the earlier film took a largely positive view of the clandestine agencies. They were there to assist in a benevolent exchange programme with our chums from beyond the stars. Here it is all control, suppression and misuse. Scanlon and his mob believe the public – and senior politicians for that matter – could not handle such spirit-shattering truths.
Shot in persuasive gloom, with much old-school lens flare, by Janusz Kaminski, Disclosure Day sticks to that line with commitment until – this is still Spielberg – encountering inevitable reservoirs of hope. Along the way, it too often loses control of the surrounding mythologies. The addition of a “device” that makes almost anything possible is too lazily convenient. Sticking to the aesthetic of the big-eyed “grey alien” – as seen in the famous alien autopsy hoax – adds a level of comedy that was surely unintentional.
[ Steven Spielberg’s best films, in reverse orderOpens in new window ]
But, at its best, this classy production reminds us why any film by this director deserves to be treated as a major event.
In cinemas from Wednesday, June 10th
