Disclosure Day review: Steven Spielberg's 'flimsy' alien drama is like 'a drab X-Files episode'

Spielberg has returned to the subject of extraterrestrial life with his new blockbuster. But, falling far short of Close Encounters and ET, it's a major disappointment.

Disclosure Day isn't the worst film of the year, but it may well be the most disappointing. For a start, it's directed by Steven Spielberg, one of the US's greatest living film-makers. And for another thing, it's about a topic that has obsessed him throughout his career: aliens coming to Earth. 

He first touched on the topic in Firelight, a film he made as a teenager in 1964. He returned to it in 1977 for his definitive UFO drama, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And he's kept coming back to it ever since. When the spine-tingling trailer for Disclosure Day was released, with a "Story by Steven Spielberg" credit hinting at how close the scenario was to his heart, many of us hoped that the 79-year-old would deliver a career-crowning masterpiece: his profound last word on a question he has been thinking about and researching for most of his life.

And what did he deliver instead? A flimsy, outdated car-chase thriller with no ideas about aliens that we haven't heard before.

Josh O'Connor stars as Daniel, a cyber-security boffin who works for a powerful organisation called Wardex. The organisation was set up to keep information about aliens secret – so, yes, on one level Disclosure Day is a rehash of Men in Black, except without the jokes. Daniel decides to reveal – or rather disclose – this information, but first he has to drive around for a while with his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), waiting for the go-ahead from his associate, Hugo (Colman Domingo). Absurdly, Hugo insists that Daniel shouldn't just put the information online. Instead, the videos he has stolen should be shared via… errr… a local television news channel. In Spielberg's mind, it seems, the world hasn't moved on since ET: The Extra Terrestrial came out.

Another plot strand features Emily Blunt as Margaret, a perky weather forecaster who suddenly finds that she can speak every language on Earth, plus one or two from elsewhere. Blunt is fantastic, and the scenes focusing on Margaret's burgeoning psychic powers are so fun that Spielberg probably should have made a film about them and ditched the rest. But most of Disclosure Day is about the sketchily drawn Noah and Jane running from Wardex's anonymous goons. Essentially, it's a drab X-Files episode, or a more conventional One Battle After Another, in which some people we don't care about are hunted by some other people we don't care about.

The villain of the piece is Colin Firth's Noah, a standard-issue baddie given standard-issue baddie dialogue: "History doesn't have a reset key," he growls. "If you do this, there's no undoing it." Firth is badly miscast. Wardex is meant to be the ultimate US deep-state cover-up operation, so it's distracting to have a well-spoken Englishman in charge. For that matter, it's distracting that Wardex is all about secrecy, but it somehow has a huge headquarters and countless employees. Wouldn't one of them have spilt the beans already?

Still, that's not the film's only head-scratching plot problem. Its biggest mystery isn't about aliens, but about why Hugo puts so much time and effort into building a life-size model house. 

Disclosure Day might not be so unsatisfying if you share the wide-eyed positivity that Spielberg puts into it, and there are some expertly choreographed action sequences, even if they do echo various Indiana Jones adventures. But the first line spoken by Firth proves to be prophetic: "Well, this is all rather disappointing." The main themes – whether aliens and a supreme deity can co-exist, and why empathy is important – are conveyed by people making long, polished speeches about them. And its thesis on alien life is so amazingly uninspired that you'd assume that Spielberg had pondered it for several minutes, not several decades.

I won't give away the ending, but there is very little in Disclosure that wasn't in the trailer – and very little that wasn't in Close Encounters almost 50 years ago.

★★☆☆☆

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