For decades, Steven Spielberg has been the guy who’s given us films with a Before-and-After momentousness in our otherwise ordinary lives. How old were you when E.T. (1982) came out? (Zero, as I was born towards the end of that year.) When did you watch 1993’s Schindler’s List? (Too late) When and how many times did you watch Jurassic Park and cower over the scene where the goat vanishes? (Four times in a movie hall, and a few more times on TV.) Naturally, the release of Disclosure Day has had Spielberg aficionados in a tizzy.
Does Disclosure Day warrant a place in the canon of unforgettable Spielberg productions? Maybe not. There’s a war brewing on Reddit, where comments like “The movie is terrible!” are met with a rather salty “Maybe you don’t like movies”. But this isn’t a movie review.
Disclosure Day starts with a bunch of black-clad bad guys trying to steal a backpack from Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) after kidnapping his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson). Improbably, they escape, thanks to a pen-sized coffin-shaped object that everyone seems to back away from but also wants. Meanwhile, in Kansas City, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a weather presenter at a local TV station with excellent white sneakers, after a moment of prolonged eye contact with a little red bird, starts speaking languages she didn’t know she knew and mind-reading and counselling the traffic cop who pulls her over, right before going on live television and speaking in clicking sounds and triggering a certain panic among those who know what it is.
Trying to hunt both of Daniel and Jane is, of course, the leader of the aforementioned bad guys, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the head of a secretive organisation called Wardex. Turns out Daniel is a whistleblower previously employed with Wardex and has with him archival footage that exposes Wardex’s misdeeds over the years. Daniel wants to disclose these to the world (hence the title), but, of course, Noah has other plans. There’s also Hugo (Colman Domingo), Daniel’s fellow whistleblower and Noah’s former colleague, who is spearheading the entire operation of do-gooders in a mysterious place that looks like an under-construction movie set. You have crop circles, deer staring deep into your soul, really inefficient goons, mind-control tech, and cars scraping on train lines.
Emily Blunt is brilliant as the quick-thinking world-saver who knows when and who to escape from (the mind-reading must come handy). Josh O’Connor has played the tortured soul with the forehead creases before and is great in his role of a man burdened with the responsibility of informing the human race about what is out there (even if his escape skills with stolen cars defy logic). Eve Hewson (Bono’s daughter, for those who didn’t know) is great, too, as the former novitiate who’s doubting Daniel’s purpose, and Colin Firth is very Michael Shannon-esque in The Shape of Water with his single-minded pursuit of the runaways. But the actor who seems to have sparked genuine interest and calls of “Somebody give her an Oscar already!” is someone who appears in the last eight minutes of the film, whom you’d have to Google after leaving the theatre.
As we’re in the titular Disclosure Day and the world is staring at their screens when the said disclosures happen, holding down the fort is a (fictional) NBC anchor played by the actor Courtney Grace (I googled her name, too) who’s making the same discovery as the rest of the world but on live TV. She’s the actor on the screen on our screen. Looking at the jerky video footage, she goes from doubtful to sceptical to disbelieving, to shocked to saddened to angry—and the transition has you hooked. Yes, the jump from sceptical to belief comes rather quickly in a character whose job description should include “healthy scepticism”, but we don’t want to be talking logic here either.
