Disclosure Day: E.T. Phone Home and Ask for a Refund

The marketing for Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day deserves its own review, because it had more plot than the movie.  First came the commercials calling it “Spielberg’s best movie in 20 years,” followed by the “Certified Fresh” rollout and a parade of familiar faces at a screening (Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Colin Farrell) presented as evidence that something important had happened.  It’s a clever PR trick because this movie is awful.  I hate saying that, because Spielberg is Spielberg.  He gave us Jaws, Jurassic Park, E.T, Indiana Jones. He invented the summer blockbuster.  Yet this is not that Spielberg.  This is Spielberg doing an impression of Spielberg after someone described Spielberg to him in a hotel lobby.

Disclosure Day begins in medias res, which is Latin for “we forgot to make the beginning interesting.” We are thrown into the action, although “action” is generous.  Mostly, it is people running around looking like they just found out their iCloud storage is full.  Secret government men chase Prince Charles from The Crown (Josh O’Connor) and Bono’s daughter, Eve Hewson.  Meanwhile, Emily Blunt plays a weather girl who can make clicking sounds with her voice, because apparently that is now a character trait.  The accents do not help.  For a movie obsessed with American secrets, it is oddly packed with British and Irish actors doing American impressions.  At one point I stopped following the conspiracy and started listening for vowel sounds.

Colin Firth plays the villain, because nothing says sinister government cover-up like a man who looks like he should be politely offering you tea.  He has a metal rod that appears to have been stolen from Krypton and uses it to control others.  Meanwhile, O’Connor runs around with video proof that aliens have been abused by the U.S. government, while Hewson spends much of the movie trembling like a human panna cotta.  Then there is Colman Domingo, who spends a suspicious amount of time building a life-size house.  Wallpaper, furniture, the full HGTV alien trauma package.  For a while, I thought maybe this was going somewhere.  Maybe this connected to E.T.  Maybe Spielberg was about to reveal we are all living in Elliott’s abandoned guest room.  I wasn’t that lucky.

You can see what Spielberg is reaching for: Holocaust imagery, the abuse of the powerless, and the fear that the truth is hidden behind locked doors.  The movie gestures toward profundity without ever becoming profound.  Even John Williams’ score feels strangely forgettable.  Notes happen.  Instruments are involved.  Nothing sticks.  Maybe even Williams looked at the footage and thought,  “Steven, my friend, I cannot French horn my way out of this.”  By the end, the alien whispers something clearly aiming for Lost in Translation mystery.  It wants us to believe something enormous has just been said.  Then the movie ends.  Nothing learned.  Nothing solved.  Nothing disclosed.

Spielberg is rich, beloved, and owns Rosebud, for heaven’s sake.  So why make something this undercooked and then send Tom Cruise out to sell it like a revelation?  I appreciate seasoned directors who are still hungry.  Scorsese still has fire.  Ridley Scott, even when he misses, misses while swinging a sword from the back of a horse.  Disclosure Day does not feel hungry.  It feels like Spielberg had a dream about a movie, woke up, wrote down “alien,” “secret,” “house” and nobody around him asked follow-up questions.

While watching it, I kept thinking about something my astronomy professor once said: “If there are intelligent life forms out there, why do they always forget to turn off the lights on their spacecraft when they fly over us?”  Honestly, that would make a better alien movie.

At least it has a point.