Butler's Cinema Scene

Emily Blunt

“DISCLOSURE DAY” My rating: C+ (In theaters on June 12)

165 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

The intergalactic mayhem of “War of the Worlds” notwithstanding, no filmmaker has done more to promote the idea of benevolent aliens than Steven Spielberg.

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial” imbued in audiences a sense of awe, in no small part because they had as protagonists a child and a child-like adult through whose eyes we experience of wondrous possibilities of the universe.

Oh, that “Disclosure Day” had a bit of that magic.  In plot (the story and screenplay are by Spielberg and David Koepp) this is in many ways a clone of “CE3K,” but in feeling, emotion, it’s dead in the water.

By now most of us are aware that “Disclosure…” is about a perilous effort to reveal to the world nearly 80 years of UFO documentation suppressed by our government. The good guys have stolen from an evil think tank dozens of super-sophisticated thumb drives containing many hundreds of hours of video, sound transmissions, photos and printed data on the phenomenon.

And now the chase is on.

Throughout the film we follow the efforts of four groups.

First there’s computer geek Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) who has gone from being a safekeeper of these secrets to a saboteur.  With a backpack crammed with world-changing data Daniel and his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) are on the run.

They are pursued by the black-clad agents of Daniel’s former employer, led by Scanlon (Colin Firth), a corporate monster with a maniacal determination to suppress this information.

Colin Firth

There’s a group of revolutionaries led by Wakefield (Colman Domingo). These are folks who once worked to keep those secrets who are now convinced they must be shared with the world.

And finally there’s Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt)l, a weather lady for a Kansas City TV station who finds herself fluent in languages she has never studied, including — in the middle of a live broadcast — a guttural clicking that appears to be of extraterrestrial origin. She also develops the ability to read and manipulate other people’s minds (or maybe it’s their souls), making her a sort of corn-fed Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Spielberg has described “Disclosure Day” as a chase film, and that’s on the money.  Here’s a filmmaker who has been creating spectacular chases for 50 years (“Duel,” “The Sugarland Express,” all of the Indiana Jones titles) and he brings all that know-how to bear on several spectacular action sequences. And thank God for his expertise, because the sheer momentum created by these moments keeps us engaged even after we start to wonder if this isn’t in support of a frothy mess of woo-woo and flapdoodle.

Spielberg and Koepp throw tons of alien mythology at the screen (crop circles, the Roswell crash, alien autopsies) , but it dribbles  out in disconnected bits and pieces. Momentarily diverting, yes, but if there’s a logic behind it I can’t find it.

Acting honors here go to Blunt, who is terrific at expressing the terror and puzzlement of her newly-developed powers (she’s got an emotional meltdown that should become a permanent part of her resume reel), and to Firth, who makes his corporate overlord a Voldemort-ish font of ruthlessness. He’s genuinely scary.

Josh O’Connor

Spielberg is a master technician…the film is beautiful and the way he moves his images within a frame (the frame is often moving as well) is spellbinding.

The weak link here is a half-baked idea and a screenplay that tries to cover  up its emptiness with superficial bustle.  

Spielberg and Co. toss in an irritating hodgepodge of religious imagery and ideas.  Jane once studied to become a nun and in one scene reacts to a form of mental torture by using the cross on her necklace to pierce her own palm.  Stigmata, anyone?  And her former mentor is a Reverend Mother (Elizabeth Marvel)  who suggests that, sure, God might have created non-human intelligence.

The filmakers also muddie things up with their version of Hitchcock’s MacGuffin, in this case an alien artifact that looks like a hotdog-sized metal ingot.  The determined Scanlon uses this device to locate his prey at great distances and then enters their minds, interrogating his mesmerized victims. Mishandled the device can be dangerous, as discovered by Scanlon’s chief thug (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), who finds himself atomized and reconstituted by the technology.

Spielberg is a great enough filmmaker that I spent the 2 1/2 hours of “Destination Day” being mildly entertained while waiting for a big payoff that never came. Indeed, the real story here is how humanity would react to this Earth-shaking revelation…and Spielberg isn’t interested in that…or is afraid of the answer.

The results are simultaneously too much and not enough.

| Robert W. Butler