Disclosure Day marks something of a homecoming for Steven Spielberg. The 79-year-old filmmaker’s mastery of the alien movie precedes him; unless you count the only barely martian-costarring Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and 2005’s War of the Worlds form a sort of trilogy and collective alien-movie template. They dealt with galactic invasion with different levels of seriousness but were interlinked by their concern with the everyday families who were disrupted by them — cinematic flare-ups, as the autobiographical and delicately self-critical The Fabelmans (2022) helped publicly burnish, of Spielberg’s personally and as it turned out creatively foundational child-of-divorce pains. 

Written by longtime collaborator David Koepp — who wrote his drafts based on long-simmering ideas Spielberg had been sitting on for a while — Disclosure Day doesn’t do enough, alien movie-wise, to eclipse the once-novel achievements of Close Encounters and E.T. It has a been-there-done-that tang, its story built on proof of extraterrestrial life, shady government types covering that up for decades, and the all-but-inevitable promise that the truth will come to light after much struggle. What will not be clarified is the buggy-eyed and bulb-headed aliens’ disposition (though they seem, from the flashes we see, to come in peace), and what, and if, they want anything in particular from the human race. Disclosure Day’s open-ended, optimism-tinted last few moments arrive with “that’s all?” anticlimax, the thump loudened by the sometimes-ponderous two and a half hours of frantic cross-country pursuit coming before it. 

Read the full review at 425.

Image: Emily Blunt in Disclosure Day. Photo by Niko Tavernise.