I wasn’t planning on having any reviews for this weekend. I had travel plans. Those plans partially fell through due to someone’s illness, but said plans weren’t outright canceled. That does mean that I had time to catch Steven Speilberg’s latest, Disclosure Day. Spielberg, while not my personal favorite living director, is a great talent, and even his lesser films at least have some interesting ideas or camera work. The only time I have ever been outright bored by one of his movies was The BFG. Every other movie of his I have seen has at least something in it that I found interesting, so if nothing else, I doubt Disclosure Day was going to be boring.
I can safely say it was certainly never boring.
Acting perhaps as something of a spiritual sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, including a musical score from John Williams and a story credit to Spielberg, the movie deals with the fact that aliens have been to Earth, but that fact has been kept secret from the general public for decades. One of those secret-keepers, Daniel (Josh O’Connor), is looking to reveal that information while working for a man named Hugo (Colman Domingo), both of whom are working against their former employer, represented by Colin Firth’s Noah Scanlon, with Daniel dragging his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) along for the ride. But then local TV weather reporter Margaret (Emily Blunt) makes a bunch of weird sounds on the air that sound vaguely like language, the hunt is on for Daniel, Margaret, and some other items I won’t go into here.
See, supposedly, Spielberg used his clout to keep images and scenes from the last act of the movie out of the film’s advertising. As such, I will respect Spielberg’s wishes by saying as little as possible about the plot. Deciding how much or how little to say about a movie plot when I write these up is always something of a challenge, but my general rule of thumb is to try not to reveal more than the basic premise and anything that was maybe spoiled by trailers. Spielberg’s title says it’s about revealing aliens are real to the public. That’s all the trailers say, and I said only a little more than that, and I am leaving it that way.
There’s actually a really good reason for that: this may be the most random movie Spielberg has ever made. I was surprised so many times about where characters went, what they did, and what they could do,. Some things were explained. Some weren’t From the very first shot, I don’t think I was prepared for whatever strange thing was going to happen next. This may be the most unpredictable movie Spielberg has ever made. Small problem: that may not be a good thing.
At one point late in the movie, a character asks, “Why am I doing this?” and I felt like a lot of characters throughout the movie could have asked the same thing. So many outright odd things happen that I wasn’t sure what to think. The movie isn’t boring. It’s just…odd. Really odd. I sometimes felt the people weren’t really acting like people. I’m not 100% sure where Spielberg was going with this one, but he didn’t phone it in or anything. It’s just a weird movie. I didn’t hate it or anything, but I wasn’t overly fond of it either.
Grade: C
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