“But what did you expect to find?”
“An answer!”
— David Laughlin, assistant to Claude Lacombe, and Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Not long ago I was speaking to a respected astrophysicist whose work touches on the ESA/NASA Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a developmental project that will hopefully launch in the next decade. The project intends to offer new insight into gravitational waves and black holes. I asked what the practical applications for this data might be, and he gave a stock response of how the very act of building and implementing LISA will lead to technological breakthroughs, a physical manifestation of the “begging the question” fallacy. But it is often true that pure scientific research, which costs a lot of money, offers no return on that investment, save for taking a few steps further on mankind’s most obvious and natural path: figuring out just what the hell life, the universe, and everything is all about.
Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s return to extra-terrestrial storytelling, is a reminder that even those with their feet seemingly planted on the ground have, at one time or another, looked up to the sky and asked “what’s out there?” For many, a codified religious order has quieted the parts of the mind that wonder, but it is in the very nature of being alive to once in a while remark “wow, this is all kinda wild that we’re here, right?” This movie, more than anything else, examines what it means to ask these questions, and whether we should be afraid of an answer.
Before you worry that the film — which stars Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Wyatt Russell, Colman Domingo, and an original score by John Willams — is just a load of philosophizing, know that Spielberg, working with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and editor Sarah Broshar, has put together a propulsive thrill ride. It’s just one where the macguffin isn’t an ark or a shark, but Truth.
As with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the bulk of the picture follows a man and a woman racing across the country because they feel compelled to do so, even if they aren’t sure why. We’ll learn that they are both experiencers, which is a somewhat new term meant to describe those who have had an encounter with a UAP, which is also a somewhat new term for UFO. But the precise wording is secondary to the central revelation that the government has been lying to us for decades, and that nearly every alien conspiracy theory is true. Even the one involving a drunk Richard Nixon and Jackie Gleason. (You can Google that one on your own.)
O’Connor plays a tech whiz at a black ops security firm working for (but outside of!) the Department of Defense, whose one job seems to be to keep a very tight lid on the great many pieces of video proof of alien visitations. Blunt is a weather forecaster in Kansas City who is suddenly cursed/blessed with remarkable powers, like instantly knowing the innermost secrets of everyone around her and speaking foreign tongues. (Including odd mathematical clicks!) Domingo is somehow in communion with higher forces who know that when these two get together, it will offer a pathway to revelation and understanding, and long held secrets will be revealed — disclosed, you might say — but Colin Firth is the man tasked with keeping everything hush hush.
What’s more, there’s a ticking clock. As it happens, the US and Russia are centimeters away from going to war thanks to a dispute in the Korean peninsula. We overhear just enough info about it as background noise while our main characters zoom from one marvelously shot set piece to the next, taking breaths periodically to muse on whether it is morally justified to withhold truth in order to maintain stability. (The fact that the world is about to blow up is pretty good evidence that a “hi, how are you?” from an interplanetary being couldn’t hurt much.) Spielberg and writer David Koepp are cribbing a bit from The Day the Earth Stood Still, modernizing awestruck Amazing Stories-like tropes to ask “well, what would actually happen if there was proof we weren’t alone?”
One interesting aspect of Disclosure Day is that the social and even theological ramifications of the big truth bomb is examined from multiple points of view, while most if not all of the alien tech that propels many of the dazzling scenes is left deliberately vague. There is one important alien device which Emily Blunt called “the thingy,” which I found particularly endearing.
This is also in line with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a masterwork that blended both 1970s post-Watergate paranoia cinema with elements of New Age-ism. Nowhere does the movie really explain what the “agreeable” musical theme means, or how the characters were drawn to Devil’s Tower. Yet it all snaps into place and feels right; the scenes follow one another to a dramatic inevitability, even if the logic has a dreamy element to it. Everything works emotionally, even if not 100 percent intellectually, which is probably the only way to ever truly come to understand the mysteries of the universe.
Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote “two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” Spielberg once again shows us there are responses other than fear.
