I was so intrigued to watch Disclosure Day as soon as it came out. I’m by no means a Steven Spielberg completist, but I really rate what he had to say about encouraging the film industry to push more original stories onto the big screen. That, and releasing Disclosure Day’s first trailer and avoiding including anything from the third act was a big slay.
There’s also something eerie about the way Spielberg talks about the origins of his screenplay and how it is based in truth. Considering Disclosure Day is all about secret government files which prove alien activity, I honestly can’t say whether I was watching something fictional or a full on documentary. Again, big slay… And that’s just the start of my unhinged thoughts.
Here’s everything that went through my mind while watching Disclosure Day.
The opening shot of Disclosure Day had me wondering if I’d sat down in the wrong screen
Spielberg gets you right into the action – action I wasn’t necessarily expecting from Disclosure Day, but I got in spades. Thrown into a first person perspective, the audience is thrown around in a boxing ring as two blokes wrestle? Box? I don’t know, but it was disorientating and I thought I was watching the wrong film for a hot second.
We slowly zone in on Josh O’Connor’s character, Dr. Daniel Kellner, sitting ring side at the fight, covertly trying to hand over a backpack we later learn holds alien technology and digital files exposing human-alien contact dating back to the Roswell incident.
The opening scene definitely sets you off-kilter, which should’ve been my first sign Disclosure Day would slowly melt my brain – in the best way!
I genuinely think Disclosure Day might be Emily Blunt’s best role to date
I know she earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress in Oppenheimer, but it is my opinion that this was Emily Blunt at her best. I was absolutely captivated by her as meteorologist Margaret Fairchild, a woman who finds herself suddenly able to understand and know everything about a person just by looking at them, sparking concern when she begins to speak in some kind of alien (pardon the pun) tongue live on air.
Her comedic delivery is superb and, I guess that’s acting, but I really felt her fear as her new psychic abilities are realised. There were so many levels to her performance, and I’ve never been a bigger fan of hers than I was watching Disclosure Day – and that’s saying something, because I love her in The Devil Wears Prada.
I was not ready for that Gwen Stefani needledrop
Long may the magical partnership between Steven Spielberg and John Williams continue – but I was living for that Gwen Stefani needledrop.
Blunt’s character is listening to the song “The Sweet Escape” in the car on her way to work, absolutely belting it out and getting a little too familiar with the acceleration. It should’ve felt jarring juxtaposed with Williams’ score, but it just worked and rang true with the peaks of humour found in Spielberg’s work against even the darkest of themes.
When Josh O’Connor’s character says “I don’t know what’s happening” I felt that
When O’Connor and Blunt’s character finally meet (or should I say *spoiler alert* reunite), she quite literally takes that “One cannot simply walk into Mordor” meme and does it, leading him away from the government officials, seemingly appearing as a loved one to each of the agents.
Kellner doesn’t realise this is all going on and, before climbing in the car with Margaret, airs his confusion. And I can’t lie when I say I turned to my friend and said, “same”, because Disclosure Day is good, but I think I’m going to need to watch it approximately 35647828 times before I fully understand what’s going on.
The action sequences in Disclosure Day were exhilarating
I don’t know about everyone else, but when I think of sci-fi, I don’t generally think about crazy action sequences. Steven Spielberg seems to blend so many genres together in Disclosure Day, though, and while it’s not slated as an action movie, it is dubbed a sci-fi thriller, and boy was I thrilled.
This film goes off. Think car chases – and even more crashes. At one point Kellner ploughs a car through the wall of a depleted farm house to scoop up his girlfriend Jane (played by Eve Hewson) before she gets picked up by agents. Later the head of security at the government department dealing with the secret alien files rams the car Margaret and Kellner are in into a passing freight train. It is tense!
Disclosure Day got me feeling existential thinking about the relationship between religion and science
Full disclosure (pardon the pun): I am not particularly religious. But Disclosure Day tackles the difficult question of whether extraterrestrial life disputes the validity of religious figures like God. It tackles this through the character of Jane, Kellner’s girlfriend and a former novitiate.
She is adamant her boyfriend shouldn’t be a whistleblower of these files that appear to prove the existence of aliens, because then what will people have left to believe in. Speaking to a nun at her former convent, something Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel) says really struck a chord in me (almost had me crying at the cinema), telling Jane she doesn’t believe she left the monastery because she lost her faith in God, but because she lost her faith in people, which feels hard not to relate to (even as a non-religious person) given… *gestures to the world*.
I also loved how Sister Maura disputed the idea that the existence of aliens would disprove God's existence, emphasising that He created all life on Earth, insinuating to Jane that two things could be true and exist in tandem. Nothing is black and white, and I don’t know, this moment really evoked something in me.
Disclosure Day truly turned my head inside and out, melted my brain, and mashed it back into my skull. And I'd experience it again and again. Now showing at Cineworld, book your tickets to watch Disclosure Day, screening in IMAX and Superscreen.
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