Close encounters (but no cigar): "Disclosure Day"

Whether you're going on the movies or the British weather, I think we can say it's been a funny sort of summer so far. With the major studios scaling back production, there was very little opening in the course of May that resembled an event movie of the old vintage - the tardy toy nostalgia of last week's Masters of the Universe, already written off as the summer's first flop, hardly counts - leaving the multiplex wide open to attack from ever-ready and always-grinding YouTubers. As I write, three of the UK's Top Five films owe their existence to online content creators, the much-discussed Backrooms and Obsession joined this past weekend by the grand finale of larky YouTube hit The Amazing Digital Circus, which - with zero in the way of pre-publicity - nevertheless pulled in more spectators than Sony's shrugging He-Man/Skeletor reunion. The studios' big idea - and, really, their last throw of the dice before the dubious spectacle of a Trump World Cup hoves into view - is to recall the now 79-year-old Steven Spielberg to four-quadrant business, and to fund him (to the tune of a reported $115m) to continue his inquiries into extraterrestrial activity. Yet Disclosure Day - written by Jurassic Park's David Koepp from a story idea by Spielberg himself - actually proves to be far less about aliens than it is about we earthlings: our doubts and fears, the lies we tell, the secrets we keep. Thematically, at least, it's not as far removed from Spielberg's recent memoir-movie The Fabelmans as you might expect.

It starts rather better than it ends: no preamble, no messing about, dropping us almost directly into the lap of a whistleblower on the run through contemporary America. Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) has his girl (Eve Hewson) at his side and a metallic doohickey in his pocket; the first fear Disclosure Day touches upon is that this thingummyjig will at some point prove crucial to the plot. Kellner is being pursued by a bearded Colin Firth, in stiffly patrician mode as a private security overlord, and he's being assisted, via burner phone, by Colman Domingo, heading up some kind of resistance movement in a comfy cardigan. More immediately compelling are the backdrops Spielberg sets his characters against. Kellner is introduced handing over a rucksack full of USBs amid the baying crowd of a wrestling match; Domingo conducts his business out of what appears to be a regional playhouse where a set is being constructed. Everything, instantly, is either sport or theatre, and another form of spectacle presents itself after a breakfast-table encounter with a strange bird leaves Kansas City weatherwoman Emily Blunt speaking first fluent Russian, to the understandable bemusement of goofball beau Wyatt Russell; then Korean, allowing her to make a critical intervention in an ongoing diplomatic crisis before the morning forecast; and then - once the camera turns her way - speaking in tongues to baffled viewers across the Midwest. It's a nice, sublimated gag on Koepp and Spielberg's part: what if a lowly weathergirl became the fount of all knowledge? But this development also speaks (if you'll pardon the pun) to what Spielberg is getting at here: people at loggerheads, talking at cross-purposes, not at all on the same page. What if aliens, by insisting on complete transparency, made their own fateful intervention in the culture wars? And what if a filmmaker best known for inspiring (and hymning) togetherness instead turned his attention to the thornier subject of today's social division?

For ninety of these 145 minutes, that's an intriguing enough hook for us to go along with, and we do feel in safe hands. Given this story's somewhat mechanical nature, Spielberg's primary task here is to reassure us: we may not initially be in possession of all the key narrative info - as Blunt is - but it will be revealed to us in time. We surely need that reassurance: this is, after all, one of this director's chillier, more paranoiac films, its atomised characters falling subject not just to remote surveillance (so that's what the doohickey does) but also passing flurries of hail and snow and the steely blue-grey palette of 2005's War of the Worlds. Spielberg's judicious flow of information actually meshes well with this plot. Whether brought about by alien bird or metal bar, alien contact here involves a bad case of TMI, downloading not just those languages but a century's worth of crashlandings and cover-ups to the cerebral cortex; as Spielberg frames it, this is not unlike mainlining everything on social media in a matter of seconds, so, y'know, best be careful, like. Disclosure Day deviates from current cinematic trends in its marked ambivalence towards tech: Spielberg even makes a scene out of two characters crushing a smartphone with a car, a fantasy many viewers outside of the Backrooms demographic may well have had in their desire to reject all cookies for eternity. But the film is old-world in other respects, too: in its sincere handling of the test of faith faced by the Hewson character, a former novitiate pressured to turn in the man she loves (she even contracts stigmata at one point), and in its cosy belief that local TV news - perhaps, after all, the right, digestible level of information - may yet come to spare us from nuclear annihilation. It should be rallying. So why was it that I came away from Disclosure Day so disappointed, and despairing all the more about the future of the American event movie?

Partly, it's a personnel problem: none of these performers disgrace themselves, but these characters - cardboard cutout goodies and baddies; moving parts, devoid of depth - just don't stick in the mind the way Roy Neary and Elliott do. Mostly, though, it's a story issue. Disclosure Day gets much less persuasive the further it goes along this path and, at some point of no return, even turns its director against itself: what you end up watching is one-third the best of Spielberg and two-thirds the worst of him. Given the prime June release date, absolutely nobody should have been expecting anything as revelatory as The Fabelmans, which seemed like a big, liberating step forward in this filmography. Even so, this feels like well-trodden ground: Spielberg's not the only person to have headed this way in this manner. (A question the film silently poses: how many X-Files reboots does any one civilisation need?) With its oddly muted thrills and spills - one good car chase through a rural farmhouse, but that's about it - the whole looks and feels like a slightly wearied attempt to get back up to full blockbuster speed, or an effort to update some lost Amblin runaround of the 1980s. I spent the entire second half wishing I was rewatching Jeff Nichols' underseen Midnight Special, a limber Spielberg homage that proved more emotionally resonant than anything the real thing arrives at here. Is it not significant that Disclosure Day should hinge on a flatpack reconstruction of an old image, familiarly lit by Janusz Kamiński, mechanically scored by John Williams, in such a way as to tell us what to feel? It's the exact moment the savvy Spielberg gets overruled and undermined by the sappy Spielberg, certain in his belief that what one character - and the world - needs now is more comforting fantasy, an echo of the past. Disclosure Day is mostly muscle memory, a twinge of something, inspired in places, laboured in many others. So this curious non-summer persists - and the old world continues to perish before our eyes.

Disclosure Day is now showing in cinemas nationwide.