Disclosure Day

August 28 – September 1

Five Days Only

Fri Aug 28 – 3:30 & 7pm
Sat Aug 29 – 7pm
Sun Aug 30 – 1:30 & 7pm
Mon Aug 31 – 7pm
Tues Sept 1 – 7pm Final show

Sci-Fi/Mystery/Thriller
Rated PG – 2 hr 21 min

Spielberg’s alien movie, Disclosure Day, is funny and sentimental with action that will leave you breathless. Emily Blunt shines in an exquisitely entertaining ride, which tangles with politics, big business and religious faith. Spielberg has dubbed this film his closing instalment of a trilogy begun by Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and ET the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). But it also feels surprisingly affected by the voracious self-reflection he pursued in his last, and semi-autobiographical, movie The Fabelmans (2022), and its conclusion that the camera is the ultimate weapon of truth, even if that truth may be hard for us to swallow.

Exquisitely woven, capital “E” entertainment, that’s funny and unabashedly sentimental in all the ways we expect Spielberg to be, with a particular action sequence primed to steal the breath out of your lungs. But he’s grown older; so has much of his audience. And faith, in its broadest terms – in people, in an existence beyond what we see before us, in the idea we can ameliorate humanity by embracing uncertainty – is harder won now. It’s no coincidence his camera lingers on the image of a hand wrapped so tightly around a gold crucifix that it’s started to bleed. Whatever we cling to, that grip will be challenged soon enough.

The film’s script, by his frequent collaborator David Koepp (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds), tosses us in at a fascinating juncture. Alien life has long been confirmed and concealed from the public. Disclosure Day opens in the middle of the fight to declassify that information. Whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity expert at the Wardex corporation, is on the run with a bit of alien technology, while his girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson) is in Wardex’s custody.

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.

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.)

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.