When the “spine-tingling” trailer for Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” was released, many of us hoped that the great director would be delivering his “career-crowning masterpiece”, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture: a “profound last word” on aliens arriving on Earth, a topic that has obsessed him for years. Instead, we have a “flimsy, outdated car-chase thriller” that contains “no ideas about aliens that we haven’t heard before”.
Josh O’Connor stars as Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity boffin who works for Wardex, a powerful US organisation that has for years been concealing proof of alien contact (yes, on one level it is “Men in Black”, but without the jokes). After stealing classified files, he becomes a fugitive pursued by Wardex’s sinister supremo (Colin Firth, “badly miscast”).
Instrumental to Kellner’s plan to expose Wardex is Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a television meteorologist who suddenly finds herself able to speak to aliens. Her scenes are “fantastic”: Spielberg should probably have made the film about her powers and “ditched the rest”.
‘Signature elegance’
There’s plenty of the director’s “signature elegance” to enjoy, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph; some scenes move “with such breathless lucidity it is as if he is beaming excitement directly into your brain”. But the plotting is “woolly and lopsided”, while the tone is “an awkward mix of solemnity and silliness”.
I enjoyed it, said David Sexton in The New Statesman – it’s “as brilliantly filmed as anything Spielberg has ever made”, with a “marvellous” performance from Blunt and a “terrific” score from John Williams (his 30th for Spielberg). It’s a “corker, a proper summer blockbuster” and “a prime example of the genre he originally created with ‘Jaws’”.
Emily Blunt is ‘fantastic’ in alien drama – but the plotting is ‘woolly and lopsided’
