Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day, his eighth science fiction film and the first since Ready Player One (2018), is arguably what he originally intended Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) to be back when he was first developing it in the early 1970s. For Spielberg, Close Encounters was a deeply personal dream project, one that he was able to make only because of the runaway success of Jaws (1975) (as biographer Joseph McBride put it, "Spielberg pulled off the remarkable feat of a making a deeply personal film on a grand scale within the Hollywood studio system"). He was inspired by everything from a meteor shower in the Arizona desert he witnessed as a child, to Cold War-era sci-fi invasion movies, but more than anything he was intrigued by the political dimensions of UFO sightings and the role of the government in hiding them.

This was, of course, the era of Watergate and Vietnam, when distrust in the government was at an all-time high, but that element was gradually written out of the script in favor of a more personal story about individual characters caught up in the arrival of extra-terrestrials. Disclosure Day, which was written by David Koepp from a story credited to Spielberg, appears to be a cobbling together of those discarded political elements, making it a kind of darker, more conspiratorial cousin to Close Encounters. Close Encounters certainly dealt with the idea of government cover-up, but Spielberg took the edge off by embodying the abstract notion of government power in the gentle presence of François Truffaut's relatively benign scientist. Such is not the case in Disclosure Day, where the forces of obfuscation are centralized in the figure of Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), a scowling menace who runs Wardex, a private corporation that is contracted by the government to keep secrets secret.

On the other side we have Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), a cybersecurity analyst who had been employed by Wardex, but is now operating with a rogue group of dissidents led by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) to expose the very secrets that Wardex has been trying to keep under wraps for decades. He has in his possession a device that Wardex desperately wants to retrieve, and he spends most of the film on the run with his beleaguered girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), who learns alongside us Daniel's past and what he knows. Meanwhile, we have a parallel plot involving Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), an ambitious television weather forecaster in Kansas City who inexplicably finds herself affected by mysterious forces that allow her to speak multiple languages and see directly into the thoughts of those around her, which sends her on a similarly frantic run with her increasingly skeptical boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell).

Thus, Disclosure Day is primarily an extended chase film, with Noah and his black-suited minions hunting both Daniel and Margaret as they try to connect with Hugo, who is strangely in the middle of a warehouse somewhere while what looks like the massive set of a residential home is being constructed in the background. Koepp structures the screenplay as a series of action sequences that each supplies a small dose of additional plot information that slowly come together; the action is often frantic, including car chases, a train chase, and lots of narrow misses and close escapes (Spielberg shows that he is a still a first-rate master of action and suspense), but the pace of the film is quite languid. Spielberg is very much operating in his long-time wheelhouse, and he clearly feels no need to make his film keep pace with more modern incarnations of the genre. It very much feels like a film made in the late 1970s, and I couldn't help but wish that he had set it in that time period, as well. It remains relatively apolitical in terms of direct references; One Battle After Another this is not.

Yet, the film's underlying argument is the same one that fueled Spielberg's The Post (2017): painful as information may be, we deserve to know about it (in this case, extra-terrestrials replace the Pentagon Papers, but the philosophical-political thrust is still consistent). From an intellectual perspective, Disclosure Day is a fascinating vehicle that revisits long-standing issues with the stressed dynamic between ordinary people and the powers that be, but it doesn't quite catch fire, possibly because the characters never achieve much depth. Josh O'Connor, who was clearly cast for his physical resemblance to a young Spielberg and therefore fills the kind of on-screen surrogate role that had been the province of Richard Dreyfuss, never makes Daniel into anything more than a plot necessity. Emily Blunt does better with Margaret, but that is also because her character arc is more complete, as she makes the full transition from unwitting, ordinary, and uninformed to being in the middle of something she never knew existed. Thus, she is the classic Hitchcockian protagonist—the everywoman thrust into extraordinary circumstances—and her very human responses give the film both its humor and its heart.

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