Disclosure Day: The Most Boring Kind of Close Encounter

This review contains spoilers.

Let’s start with what works. It moves along at a fairly brisk pace.

Emily Blunt plays Margaret Fairchild, whose sudden ability to understand foreign languages and read other people gives the film some genuinely fascinating moments. There is something gloriously superhero-like about gaining access to knowledge you have never acquired yourself. I immediately thought of Bradley Cooper in Limitless. I have always wanted that ability. To know the answers to the universe’s questions. To understand other people. To know what the hell Spielberg wants with this film.

Blunt makes the transformation work. She can be both frightened and drawn to what is happening inside her, and in those moments I actually feel the curiosity the film otherwise expends so much energy telling me I should have. But every time something lands, another layer gets piled on top. More feeling. More meaning. More insistence that we are now witnessing something enormous.

It is layer cake with custard on top of custard. By the end, Spielberg is practically squirting it straight into my mouth while I try to signal that I was already full three scenes ago.

The story, written by David Koepp from Spielberg’s idea, also follows whistleblower Daniel Kellner. He has taken secret material from the company Wardex, which has exploited alien technology and hidden the truth about visits from space. Now the information has to get out before armed men silence him. It is a simple and useful engine for a thriller. It ought to run.

The problem is that the film keeps changing what is possible, without ever giving me any real sense of the limits. The special abilities and alien technology eventually become a universal tool the screenplay can pull out of its pocket. Need a way out? We have a gadget. The situation looks impossible? Apparently the gadget can do that too.

I do not need a user manual for a spaceship. But I do need to feel when the characters are in danger. If the answer can always be yet another trait we just happen to discover, I stop worrying.

A sequence in which a rescue operation has to be carried out among armed guards in broad daylight becomes, for me, almost a demonstration of the problem. There is plenty of military hardware and plenty of people who ought to be hard to get past. And yet I come away with the sense that the security mostly exists because someone ordered the uniforms. The film wants the suspense of an impossible mission, but I do not buy how easily it slips through.

The same goes for Colin Firth’s Noah Scanlon. Near the end, when the revelation can no longer be stopped, he sits down in resignation. I understand the practical point: he has lost. But dramatically, it feels as if the film’s big antagonist has just noticed that his parking ticket expired. After all that pursuit and all those resources, I expected an ending you could actually feel.

And then there is religion. Eve Hewson’s Jane has a past as a novice, which opens the door to questions about faith and our place in the universe. That could have been interesting. What do you do with your idea of human exceptionalism when someone lands and proves that we may just be a very noisy stopover? But for me it never gets beyond suggestion. The film puts a huge question on the table and hurries on before anyone has to answer it.

It all feels treated with a kind of Disney spray. Every time a bit of edge or genuine unease appears, a soft cloth comes along and wipes it away. I am perfectly happy to go along with an adventure. I do not require every alien to lay eggs in someone’s chest. But even an adventure needs something at stake. Here I feel the film trying to calm me down while it is also trying to make me nervous.

The actors deserve better. In particular, Colman Domingo gives Hugo Wakefield, who helps bring the truth out, a conviction that I miss around him. I believe that this man has something to fight for. When he is on screen, the project gains a human center of gravity. Blunt is good too, and the film looks handsome. Those are the qualities that earn the two stars.

But a beautiful wrapper does not make the package more interesting. And when the revelation is finally sent out into the world, what irritates me most is how little I feel. Yes, there are aliens. That was kind of the reason I bought the ticket. I miss the journey to that realization giving me more than a confirmation of the film’s sales pitch.

At the very end, we are asked to listen. Then the film cuts to black. It is probably meant as an invitation to reflection. By then, I mostly wanted someone to say something worth hearing.

So what?

I wanted to be overwhelmed, frightened, or simply well entertained. Instead, I was left with a handsome, sentimental and oddly harmless alien film that kept promising me a big experience any minute now. The universe is apparently full of intelligent life. What I missed most was a little life in the film.