REEL | Full 'Disclosure Day' – Spielberg Believes in Close Encounters

"The rejection of this understanding is leading to our extinction."

Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

Disclosure Day is legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg's succesfful return to the extraterrestrial action blockbuster genre he pioneered and a spiritually thematic follow-up to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Framed around the idea of exposing seventy-nine years of (fictional) conspiratorial cover-ups of meaningful alien contact on Earth, his latest film exposes both human ideals and paranoia surrounding the disclosure and societal awakening of a history of otherworldly evidence that we are definitely not alone in the universe.

Starring the great Emily Blunt and affable Josh O'Connor as two mysteriously connected American strangers, a Kansas City meteorologist and a troubled ex-con cybersecurity expert, who share a secret backstory, the extended chase portion of the film's first half drags before more of Spielberg, who also wrote the film's story, and his trademark storytelling delve into a mashup of non-governmental conspiracies to keep the truth of alien contact from the public. It manages to somehow be simultaneously a narratively straightforward yet emotionally complex setup as Blunt's gradual transformation into a fully-fledged hero comes into light alongside the film's rising action.

Both Colin Firth and Colman Domingo serve as familiar authority figures on opposing sides of the "disclosure" mission that the film unfolds. For a breakneck story largely about individual characters questioning their own beliefs and empathy on whether to expose our collective knowledge, there's plenty of action, car chases, and sci-fi special effects to dazzle us, accompanied by famed composer John Williams' energetic score.

From an occasionally clumsy but supremely earnest script by prolific blockbuster screenwriter David Koepp, Disclosure Day explores a couple of extraordinary days leading up to humanity's sentimental reaction to the exposure that we are not alone and that extraterrestrial beings have existed on Earth in some form for nearly eight decades. Told through intense action and high-stakes personal drama, its everyday characters slowly come to terms with our place in the world.


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