Disclosure Day review – close encounters of a deferred kind in Spielberg’s conspiracy spectacular

The old school is the new school in this very enjoyable and entirely ridiculous space-alien conspiracy adventure from screenwriter David Koepp and director Steven Spielberg; it is cheerfully mischievous and deadly serious in equal measure. It has something of Hitchcock from North By Northwest, Christopher Nolan from Inception and Spielberg from pretty much every other movie he’s ever made. Spielberg incidentally appears in the trailer for this film, disclosing that, hand-on-heart, he really believes in its contents, in the way I imagine CS Lewis believed in Aslan and the secret Narnian sovereignty of Peter and Susan.

Only Spielberg could get away with taking two of the world’s best-known hoaxes – Roswell and crop circles – and treating them with judicious deadpan respect. With heartfelt idealism, Spielberg also asks us to believe that should the ultimate truth come out, people everywhere would be terribly upset at the way captured aliens have been vivisected. (I suspect that would be very far down the list of our concerns.)

Emily Blunt gives a really funny and hyperactive star performance as Margaret Fairchild, employed in Kansas City, Missouri, as a local TV weather presenter, that time-honoured movie symbol of pure celeb flightiness and ambition. On a tense news day, with nuclear powers facing off in North Korea, Margaret gets light-headed at the sight of a little red bird fluttering into her apartment, a mysterious apparition which appears to trigger weird Jedi-style mental powers. She can speak Russian and Korean without knowing she’s doing it; she reads the mind of the traffic cop pulling her over on the way to work; and when she’s on camera, her mouth opens and what comes out is a clicking noise, like Flipper the dolphin sending worrying news from Mars.

Josh O'Connor in Disclosure Day. Photograph: Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment/AP

Meanwhile, a brilliant young cybersecurity analyst called Dr Daniel Kellner is risking his life to be a whistleblower at a secretive corporation called Wardex; he is played with a priestly expression of martyred determination by Josh O’Connor. For decades, this creepy company has been working for successive US governments, advising them on how to handle certain incursions from unusual parties who may not be, strictly speaking, Earthling, and how to contain and suppress news of these events. Now Daniel is on the run with a MacGuffiny mystical object in his fist, planning a disclosure of these state secrets (a “revelation” maybe sounded too biblical), accompanied by his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), a former novitiate nun struggling to align her lost vocation with what she is only just now finding out about.

Daniel is being pursued in mind and body by sinister Wardex supremo Noah Scanlon, played with clench-jawed rage and darkly tailored suits by Colin Firth. But Daniel is also in contact with former boss and fellow whistleblower Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) who, while on the phone to him coordinating his escape manoeuvres, appears to be building some sort of occult stage set. (So we can add Spielberg’s Disclosure Day to Kane Parsons’ Backrooms on the list of films influenced by Nathan Fielder’s TV series The Rehearsal.)

Eventually, the lives and destinies of Daniel and Margaret are to come together in a blissful yet terrifying epiphany, an enlightened surrender to things that are happening to them in this new, higher, childlike state of adulthood; it is in effect a coronation of their entwined purity and joint emotional connection to undreamed-of beings who believe in empathy above all things. (Which is fair enough, although, in theory, don’t we humans also believe in the primacy of empathy? Didn’t we once feel that this moral rectitude was consistent with imperial conquest?)

Disclosure Day is never anything other than entertaining and grade-A fun; rare enough in the movies or anywhere else, rocketing along with barnstorming set-pieces, exhilarating chases, funny lines and a career-topper of a performance from Blunt who may yet be morphing into a female version of Tom Hanks. But I have to say that there is an ancient echo from the world of Spielberg’s early career: the shark or alien is scariest – in fact, exists at its fullest – when it is unseen. When we see it, there is always the danger of unintended bathos and I think it is a minor problem here.

Colin Firth in Disclosure Day. Photograph: Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment/AP

However, Disclosure Day does give us once again a very Spielbergian primal scene of suburban childhood, though not with the devastating reality of his autobiographical The Fabelmans; rather, it is that aliens give Spielberg his way of defying the old maxim about not being able to go home. This is his recovered memory of childhood, the willed, transformative rediscovery of that early state in which rapture was still possible.