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| Emily Blunt in Disclosure Day |
Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, Wyatt Russell, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Elizabeth Marvel, Hettienne Park, Tommy Martinez. Screenplay: David Koepp. Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski. Production design: Adam Stockhausen. Film editing: Sarah Broshar. Music: John Williams.
David Koepp's screenplay for Disclosure Day reportedly went through 42 drafts, and it shows. There are scenes that have no important plot function, like the one in which Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) finds himself in the middle of a crop circle just as it's being created. There are characters such as Jackson (Wyatt Russell), the boyfriend of the film's protagonist, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), who don't have enough to do. There are too many car chases and hair's-breadth escapes. There is the pointlessly meticulous (and improbable) reconstruction of Margaret's childhood home. It's as if there was something in each of those drafts that Steven Spielberg thought was too good not to include in the final product, a rather frantic and fractured attempt to recapture the wonder that his earlier films evoked. The movie's thrills, such as the scene with the car and the freight train, are skillfully executed, but they come across as set pieces that any competent director might have staged, and not as part of a fully envisioned narrative. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) are classics that felt in touch with the audience, set in the middle-class families that Spielberg knew and embraced as his milieu. Disclosure Day makes a feint at that by re-creating Margaret's childhood, but only in passing. It's a thriller without roots in ordinary experience, out to surprise the audience rather than embrace it. Good work by Blunt, O'Connor, Colin Firth, and Colman Domingo makes the characters come alive, but the film crafted around them is a coldly mechanical collection of half-baked ideas about the possibility of a governmental and corporate cover-up of alien life among us.
