DISCLOSURE DAY : MOVIE REVIEW
RATING : 2.5 STARS /  5  (Above Average) 
DIRECTOR : STEVEN SPIELBERG 
ENGLISH, 2026 
 
How many 79 year young directors do you know that can self-fund a $115 million movie and direct it in a fairly thrilling way that pulls in the first weekend crowd worldwide ?  Apart from his coeval and colleague Martin Scorsese, there's no one else in the world with this gobal skill and lasting power, at an age when the rest doodle in rest homes. Hurraayyy, it's an alien movie - a favourite of Steven even when his knickers were far younger. But Spielberg is not alone among the big-shots in trying to spill the extra-terrestrial beans in his swansong years. Master novelist Sidney Sheldon whistle-blew a similar tune in his novel's epilogue.  U.S President Barack Obama answered "Yes", when he was asked whether aliens were real (although he may actually have been talking about his successor). As for 'Disclosure Day', it's a decent thriller while it lasts - the true vision, grandeur and epiphanies are unfortunately not there in the story to begin with, and it's second-rate Spielberg when the hoopla subsides.
 
The first shot of the film is a WWF wrestler stamping down on us (expect an alien to do the same to us considering how poorly we have treated the rest of life on Earth). A cybersecurity expert Dr Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) and his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) are cornered by armed men from Wardex, a covert agency led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). Apparently Daniel has secret mystical objects with him that Wardex wants to take back. Meanwhile, TV weather presenter Margaret Fairchild (a brilliant Emily Blunt) starts talking weird during the broadcast, again triggering an 'alien alert' amongst the Wardex chaps who try to hunt her down too. The lone source of succour for these targets is Hugo Wakefield, an ex-Wardex chief (Colman Domingo) who knows why they are special. All three - Daniel, Jane and Margaret - must now escape Wardex's escalating dragnet while we wonder what great secret - extraterrestrial or otherwise - this trio might unleash. 
 
When I think about outstanding 'alien' movies that push the boundaries of imagination,  "Contact" (1997) brilliantly conceptualized by Carl Sagan and supremely directed by Robert Zemeckis, comes to mind. The aliens make contact alright, but most of humanity is left scratching its head as to why we can't or aren't allowed untrammelled communication with them. World-travelling information arrives on schematics ranged upon pages and pages of material which Earth's minds can't assemble into coherent formulas - it falls to genius engineer S R Hadden to make the pages speak by assembling them into 3 D configurations - he wisely states that a superior intelligence thinks along more dynamic planes than just basic topography. 
 
Such heights of smart thinking are absent in  "Disclosure Day". There is a creative flash where Margaret channels an enigmatic supernatural trick to daze those who try to capture her but the buck pretty much stops there. Spielberg might have come to know aliens exist and this - one of his swansong films - might have been conceived as a grand encouragement to the government to disclose this earth-shaking reality. But he could have employed bigger leaps of imagination in showing us this very journey, considering how fertile the ground is to show us what superior alien intelligence is capable of (I defended his "War of the Worlds" wall to wall apocalyptic action as a successful example of a vision of humans on the run, as completely separate from any agenda of exploring the potential of an alien story).
 
Here though, that thriller ground has already been tread decades ago, and what we get is another chase-based mechanical ride. Any possibility of a novel alien body design ? Nope. They have an upright posture and similar structure like us - a head on top with eyes,  mouth, and upper and lower limbs. What a waste of cosmic imagination !  
 
Pic's strength lies in strong action elements. Spielberg and his regular collaborator-cinematographer Janusz Kaminski know their way around grand, terrain-waltzing crane / drone shots as Daniel finagles a car, barn-breaks a house and another impressive action sequence transpires alongside a thundering train.
 
I was almost convinced Eve Hewson was the daughter of American chef Alex Guarnaschelli, given Hewson's soft, mellow face and resemblance to said person, but it turns out she's the daughter of rockstar Bono. Emily Blunt, as Margaret, lands the film's best performance with her bursts of cheery acting amidst doubtful downturns and it's a bit of a shame she did not have a more imaginative project built around her poignant moist eyes and half-tortured fully pretty visage in this major racy release. 
 
 
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