Disclosure Day: Movie Review

"We've been raised to believe in a supreme being, and now you want to show actual superior beings? People can't handle both."

Steven Spielberg isn’t back. He just never left.

I was absolutely floored by this movie. By the time the end credits rolled, I was speechless (and if you know me, you know that's rare). I walked back home in silence, with no music in my headphones, just pondering over what an incredible story I just witnessed.

It's been really interesting reading other people's reviews and thoughts on this movie, as it's been received with polarising feedback from both the public and the critics. It's one of those films that, if you like it, you absolutely love it, and if you don't, you'll probably walk away quite disappointed.

A big reason as to why I think some people have been underwhelmed by it is because it's nothing like what you would expect going into it. Tonally and thematically it's full of surprises, extending itself so much further than just being an alien sci-fi movie. At its core, the story is about aliens, but the film has so much more to say that the aliens themselves end up feeling like a subplot. If you're going into it expecting something along the lines of Independence Day, you're not going to get that. Instead, this movie is about understanding, about empathy, about our place in the Universe, about God and faith. It's so many different things all wrapped up into one that, by the time the credits roll, you're overwhelmed with emotion.

Something that hooked me right from the beginning was that the movie throws us straight into the action. There's no lenghty world building, no first-act exposition; we're thrown into the conflict of the movie from the first scene, in a way that sets us up perfectly for two hours and a half of craziness. For the first thirty minutes you don't understand exactly what's going on or how it's all connected, but you're having fun figuring it out at the same time as the characters.

Spielberg's magic shines like no other in this movie. Firstly, it's shot and lit beautifully. The blocking in some of these scenes is some of the best of the decade, and there's several action scenes that are shot with such technical creativity that you feel like you're in the middle of them. Secondly, the writing is beautiful and profound, with several lines of dialogue that stick with you long after the scene ends (a particular favourite of mine that made me gasp in the cinema is "You haven't lost your belief in God. You lost your faith in people").

Emily Blunt has never been better. She's an amazing actress and she usually steals the scene in any movie she's in, but in Disclosure Day, she goes to a length I didn't know she was capable of going to. Credit to Spielberg for what I'm sure is impeccable directing and understanding of what he wanted her character to be, and credit to Emily herself for not only stepping up to the task, but overachieving it. She has a couple of scenes in this that I can easily imagine being played as her acting clip for an Oscar nomination.

Josh O'Connor is as charming as ever and elevates every scene he appears in. The rest of the ensemble cast is equally delightful to watch. Eve Hewson particularly impressed me; many of her strongest scenes are shared with Colin Firth, and she more than holds her own alongside him. Colman Domingo has never given a bad performance in his life, and this film does nothing to change that, while Wyatt Russell delivers some of the funniest moments in the entire movie.

But there's one performance that nobody could have expected to receive any real attention or praise, yet it ends up taking the film from great to genuinely spine-chilling. Courtney Grace plays a news anchor who only appears during the final ten minutes of the movie, and she absolutely knocks it out of the park. I can't remember another instance where the second-best performance in a film (or, for some, arguably the best) came from an unknown actor who appears in less than ten percent of the runtime and only shows up near the very end. Courtney Grace's character is the one tasked with breaking the news to the world on live television that extraterrestrial life exists and has existed for many years, and she delivers it with such conviction and emotion that it brought me to tears.

Which leads me nicely into talking about the strongest part of the movie: the last twenty minutes. Up until then, I was enjoying the film and thinking to myself "this is a good film, I'm having fun, you can never go wrong with a Spielberg flick". And then the last twenty minutes happened and I leaned in my seat, hands on my knees, completely locked in. You can see exactly where the ending is headed long before it arrives, but when it finally does, it still lands with all the intensity you'd expect. Then the classified footage gets released on the news, and that's when I started crying.

I would've never expected a movie like this one to have this sort of emotional effect on me, but it did. That whole final sequence elevated this from being a good movie, for me, to my favourite movie of the year so far. Steven Spielberg knows his strengths, and he knows he doesn't have to overcomplicate anything. The footage of the aliens throughout those seventy years is simple, but it's so incredibly effective that you can't help but tremble and get a lump in your throat as you're watching it.

And then the end comes. And it's nothing more than what it needs to be. And it will linger with you.

"Listen"