DISCLOSURE DAY Is an Entertaining Sci-Fi Heist, But Has Nothing New To Say

⚡ Quick Take

• Disclosure Day works as an entertaining sci-fi heist with a world-class Emily Blunt performance, but as a serious drama it’s empty and trite.

If you’re looking for an entertaining summer blockbuster, then Disclosure Day is the movie for you. It’s a good time at the theaters if you watch it for what it is and not what you thought it might be. Steven Spielberg’s latest works as a well-made, mindless sci-fi heist that is elevated by a handful of powerful sequences and an Oscar-worthy performance from Emily Blunt. But if you’re hoping to see a truly great movie with something interesting or insightful to say, look elsewhere. Disclosure Day has no new ideas and doesn’t do a very good job exploring the old ones it relies on.

Disclosure Day works best as a moviegoing experience when you realize it’s spiritually a popcorn flick with a giant budget. It (mostly) looks great and has real scope. Disclosure Day feels big even when it’s driving through mostly abandoned farmland in the Midwest. Unsurprisingly, the director who made dinosaurs look real in 1993 didn’t forget what a deer or raccoon looks like. There’s a narrative reason for those unnatural CGI animals. The real issue with the visuals and cinematography come in the last 20 minutes. The end of this movie features sequences that look laughably bad. They also contribute to the film’s lame conclusion.

The movie also has some fun sci-fi elements that it wisely doesn’t over explain. You know as much as you need to know about alien artifacts and nothing more. That approach helps the pacing while avoiding needless exposition. Ultimately, in terms of structure and storytelling, Disclosure Day has far more in common with movies like Enemy of the State or The Firm than most science fiction, even if it does resemble Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.

Universal Pictures

I love both of those movies and consider them top notch popcorn flicks, which are some of my favorite movie experiences. I don’t use that term or “B-movie” as pejoratives. The issue for Disclosure Day is that it certainly thinks it’s so much more than that. It wants you to view it as a deep, insightful, powerful drama.

It ain’t. At all.

It’s genuinely shocking just how little Disclosure Day has to say. Its biggest ideas feel trite at best and stolen at worst. There’s not a single new or interesting idea in this film. Its most prominent themes feel like they were lifted directly from Men in Black and Contact, two vastly superior movies that both do a much better job exploring the ideas Disclosure Day is apparently most interested in. I say apparently because screenwriter David Koepp’s script is sort of a sneaky disaster. It deals a lot with what the existence of aliens would mean for faith. It’s the idea the movie spends the most time on. And yet it still feels like an incomplete exploration with very little payoff.

Universal Pictures

The movie’s main idea, which is about co-existing and empathy, somehow feels like less than afterthought. It’s barely mentioned, let alone developed. How can I say an idea that’s barely present in a film is clearly its main theme? I can’t tell you without spoiling the ending, but I can tell you I didn’t know whether to laugh or groan when the credits rolled. It’s just….nothing. And, fair or not, I expected a whole lot more from a sci-fi movie made by the same director behind Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jurassic Park, and Minority Report.

Instead of Disclosure Day giving me something to think about, all I could think was, “I’ve heard all of this before in better movies.” I’m not exaggerating when I say the iconic bench scene between Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith in Men in Black, the one where they discuss how “a person is smart, people are dumb,” has far more heft and intellectual power than any equivalent idea or scene in Disclosure Day. (That’s not a knock on Men in Black, a perfect movie. I’m saying that one great scene bests the entirety of Disclosure Day‘s own attempts at deep thought.) Every exploration of faith and the concept of aliens existing in this movie was done with more care and thought by Contact.

Universal Pictures

Another big reason to only watch Disclosure Day as pure entertainment rather than a serious drama is because its plot is essentially nonsense. If you think critically about what happens for more than five seconds the whole thing falls apart. The more you reflect on this movie the more it becomes downright stupid. People with unfathomable power do (or do not do) obvious things because the plot needs that to happen. The result is many moments and plot points that feel entirely inauthentic. There are also a handful of scenes that are at best not earned and at worst clunky and awkward. On a few occasions, the dialogue also suddenly gets hammy. It reads as a desperate attempt to give the story a meaning it never comes close to offering.

When it ended my first thought was, “That was it? Why did they make that movie?” My next thought was—despite a dud of an ending that gets lamer the more you sit with it—“I’m far more interested in what happens next than what I just watched.” Disclosure Day feels like a subpar prequel to a far more interesting movie they forgot to make.

Universal Pictures

It might seem impossible I can be this harsh about a movie I found banal and empty yet still say it was generally entertaining, but it really does work as a well-crafted B-movie. It’s also buoyed by what might be the best performance of Emily Blunt’s career. She’s incredible as the weather woman for a local news cast who suddenly finds herself possessing unexplained gifts. Her Margaret Fairchild is in a far more interesting film than anyone else. She also has scenes so good and so emotional, I found myself on the verge of tears multiple times.

Margaret’s own story does fit into what the film is attempting to do say about being heard and understood. But her journey is far better than the bigger one she finds herself caught up in. It’s truly beautiful and profound and I wish it got even more focus than it did. The script just doesn’t fully appreciate what it’s doing with her. It also fumbles Margaret’s arc (along with everything else) in the end. But at least along the way Blunt, who is truly a powerhouse presence in the film, gives us a reason to keep watching all on her own. The problem is every time we leave Margaret, we go right back to the empty sci-fi heist. And that movie has little else to hold on to.

Universal Pictures

The rest of the cast is also really good, but the script simply doesn’t give them enough to do. Colin Firth gets a couple of great scenes as the primary villain Noah Scanlon, but it’s not nearly enough. I was desperate to get even more from his character. That was even more true of Josh O’Connor’s abnormally brilliant hacker Dr. Daniel Kellner. O’Connor is good. He’s just not asked to do much despite being the co-lead. The same is true of Colman Domingo’s Hugo, a character so underwritten it’s a testament to Domingo’s talent that Hugo doesn’t disappear into the background. He’s mostly walks around one same small room and talks while smiling.

Besides Blunt’s Margaret, the script really only gives Eve Hewson’s Jane a chance to shine. She’s the character who most struggles with her faith and whether or not to tell the world the truth about aliens. Then the movie bungles her story the same as it bungles everything else.

For what I hoped and expected from one of cinema’s greatest directors, Disclosure Day is disappointing. Outside of Emily Blunt’s performance, it’s just not a good movie. At least not on its own terms. But if you treat it as entertainment it is a fun one.

Disclosure Day hits theaters on June 12.

Disclosure Day ⭐ (3 of 5)

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. He wants to talk about the absurd end of this movie after you see it. You can follow him on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

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