Legendary director, Steven Spielberg, returns with another foray into sci-fi thriller! He also collaborates again with legendary composer John Williams, writer David Koepp and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński. Was Disclosure Day a recipe for success or did it fall short?
The thing that will stick with you after the film ends is how phenomenal Emily Blunt’s performance was. She does a downright amazing job in illustrating her character’s struggle with the weird things occurring to her. She steals every scene she is in by giving an emotional and empathetic performance that is genuinely breathtaking. There is a reason many are saying this is one of career best performance. Colman Domingo gives a stand-out performance too, despite his significantly smaller role. There is one scene where he gives a strong and powerful performance, that I wish we got more on his character. The rest of the cast also do a great job with special mention to Josh O'Connor and Colin Firth who are very enjoyable to watch.
You can’t have a thriller without some action sequences and Disclosure Day does have some fun action. There are a couple of tense car chases while also the fun cat and mouse chase in the first half. I also really enjoy that the antagonist, played wonderfully by Colin Firth, was using reversed-engineer alien tech to hunt down the protagonist. The film also explores some interesting themes such as the intersection of science and religion, truth, faith and empathy. Within the story, there are debates about what would happen if you did full disclosure including potential chaos and even potentially invalidating human concept of religion.
Unfortunately, the ideas are only really touched upon and the story never really fully delves into anything. The characters aren’t explored enough to be as attached and the film even swaps main characters in the second half. This is jarring because the main character of the first half gets very sidelined in the second half. While actors do give emotional performances, the moment just doesn’t hit hard because the story is too messy and even bland at times to really resonate with the audience. There are also so many silly moments where characters do stupid things, including the antagonist group. One moment is fine but 3-4 times is where things become frustrating to watch. The final act of the film is also going to be extremely divisive. While I do get the message, it feels very contrived and overly convenient.
John Williams composed some of the film music scores in cinema history! However, his score in Disclosure Day is the most forgettable score I ever heard. I can’t remember or even hum anything from this film. It seems to me that they both agreed to underscore the film to not distract from the story but this was a mistake. The emotional moments would hit harder with a stronger music score and even having a memorable theme like with Jaws, Indiana Jones or Jurassic Park would have made this film stand out more! The visuals by Janusz Kamiński aren’t any better. There are a couple decent shots and camerawork from Spielberg. However, the visual and lighting are genuinely just dark and bland. This film needed a visual that popped with its tense thriller chases but it ended up looking like any other generic thriller. The CG is also not good, especially the CG animals which look awful.
It is sad to see a Spielberg film be kind of underwhelming. He has shown to be excellent with sci-fi films but this lacks the wonder of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the heart of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Unfortunately, I do wonder if Spielberg has run out of steam.
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