Steven Spielberg’s 37th feature as director has landed, and it's a corker — a proper summer blockbuster that hearkens back to the genre he created with Jaws. But Disclosure Day, his fourth film about aliens (or perhaps his third, given his 2005 War of the Worlds was a 9/11 metaphor), is emotionally hardly about outer space at all. If E.T. was about humans bonding with aliens, this is about humans learning to bond with each other.
The film kicks off with a dynamic scene at a mixed martial arts show, where security expert Daniel (Josh O’Connor) is attacked by black-clad agents of Wardex, the secret organisation that has ruthlessly suppressed the truth about aliens for 79 years. Daniel has just stolen data sticks of evidence and an alien device — a MacGuffin that drives a straightfoward Hitchcockian chase. He is aided by his ex-nun girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) and eventually links up with Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a restless Kansas City weather girl who develops extraordinary gifts after a cardinal lands on her breakfast table.
“Spielberg's Disclosure Day is hailed as Emily Blunt's career-best in an alien epic about human connection.”
Blunt, the film's absolute star, moves seamlessly between flawless comedic timing and despair, from her hilarious "hailstones shimmy" to suddenly speaking Russian. The i newspaper calls it her best-ever performance and says it’s surely time for an Oscar. Colin Firth plays Noah Scanlon, the twisted Englishman leading Wardex, while Colman Domingo’s Hugo leads the sympathetic employees trying to get the truth out.
Spielberg, promoting the film, said: "I am much more inclined now than when I made Close Encounters of the Third Kind to really believe that we are not the only intelligent civilisation in the universe." The film, despite its bleak outlook on global self-interest, is deeply embedded with a very Spielbergian hopefulness for human empathy. With a giant, glorious cast doing career-best work, Disclosure Day may be the blockbuster that finally earns Blunt her Oscar — but whether the Academy notices remains to be seen.