Disclosure Day: Movie Review

Cast: Emily Blunt, Colin Firth, Josh O'Connor, Colman Domingo, Eve Hewson
Director: Steven Spielberg

Director Steven Spielberg has always had an eye for the wondrous and the fantastical.

However his latest shows a filmmaker who's seemingly lost touch with some semblance of dramatic reality.

Plunging directly into the modern-day world  with an escalating situation involving North Korea (the details of which are frustratingly scant), Disclosure Day follows two seemingly disparate people who are inextricably bound.

The first is on-the-run Daniel Kellner (O'Connor) who is being hunted by shadowy government organization Wardex, headed by the sinister Scanlon (Firth).

The second is restless smalltown TV weather presenter Margaret Fairchild (an uniformly excellent Blunt, who deftly turns on a dime), whose world changes abruptly when she starts talking in an unknown dialect on air.

Behind the scenes of all of this is Colman Domingo's puppetmaster Hugo, whose desire to get the truth out there about government dealings binds everything together...

Disclosure Day promised so much in mysterious trailers that played up the alien and the action edges.

But the film itself delivers little in way of a sense of the alien and the human conflict which hasn't already been done better by 90s sci-fi series The X-Files.

It's even got big things to ask about ideologies clashing, about what happens to faith if we're not the only ones here - issues that are raised early on but just are frustratingly cast aside.

And yet, in between government agents acting extremely dumb and plot conveniences flying around, there are some wonderful touches, some reminders of the old Spielberg magic.

Whether it's a sequence involving animals that seem benign that changes on the simple turn of a camera or a tight train-set action scene, Spielberg still knows how to craft the wondrous.

And his cast is solid too.

Whether it's Firth playing up some of the ambiguity of his control issues or Blunt's completely compelling performance which runs the gamut of human emotions from scared to intrigued, there is much to admire from the human elements.

 However, too much of Disclosure Day is clothed within cod psychology, trauma exploration or just outright hokum to recall the sense of impact aliens had during the world of Close Encounters of the Third Kind or E.T.

Plus some ropey CGI moments and aliens just lower proceedings and delivers more guffaws than awe-filled moments.

The promise shown between Hewson's faith-fuelled Jane and O'Connor' Danny has much of the old Mulder and Scully dynamic until it's abandoned.

The truth may be out there - but based on this alone, the simple truth of the matter is that Disclosure Day just isn't as good as it could have been.

And its last scene alone shows just unnecessarily didactic and not based in reality Spielberg's tale has become over nearly 150 minutes.

It's a shame that the filmmaker who has spent so much of his career looking to the skies for inspiration seems to have become lost in the clouds for this movie - it's one of the biggest disappointments of the year - a drab, dull chase thriller that rarely thrills.