Ridiculously engaging. Finds this line between operating as a straight deep-state intelligence thriller and as something on the difficulties of commitment. Carries the deep discomfort and paranoia that characterised much of Spielberg's post-9/11 work. the way it builds up to the final 30 minutes is unbelievable, my eyes were full of tears as the end credits began to roll. Found myself really moved by the palpable humanity of it all - a collective cut through government secrecy. Don’t think Emily Blunt has ever been better. Some of the compositions are truly spell-binding - full of haunting mirrored expressions, tracking shots, and some of the best blocking you’ll likely see this decade. And those chase sequences! So much fun. Looks like a real real movie. Actually very weird at times tonally, M. Night-like in ways as others have said (very much complimentary). Not only in terms of humour but also in the way it employs faith as a shield. Really really loved this, can see others not doing. Probably not entirely what you expect.
Steven Spielberg has now made five movies about aliens (six if you count the 20-minute “Firelight” that he shot on Super 8mm when he was 17, and seven if you roll with my alternate reading of “The BFG”), and all of them are very straightforward about their shared belief that we are not by ourselves in the cosmos. Mystery abounds, but the basic existence of extraterrestrial life is unambiguously confirmed by the end of the first reel.From “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “War of the Worlds” and even “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” these films waste no time in confronting their characters with the answer to a question that has tugged at the human imagination since at least the second century AD (when ancient Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote about a conflict on the moon), and they do so for the simple reason that Spielberg is less interested in wondering if we’re alone in the universe than he is in leveraging the universe to wonder how we can feel so alone in our own lives. While his aliens haven’t always come in peace (often, but not always), their arrivals and/or sudden revelations have always motivated very earthbound stories about the intimate fractures that form within families, communities, and ourselves. In “Close Encounters,” little gray men come all the way from deep space to fulfill Spielberg’s fantasy of reuniting his parents; in “War of the Worlds,” buried tripods from some far-off star are closer to the surface of New Jersey than a divorced longshoreman is to his teenage son. Spielberg’s aliens illustrate how the distance between two people on the same planet can be as vast as the span from one galaxy to another. But Spielberg, who’s dedicated his mortal existence to mining universal spectacle from the specific traumas of his own childhood, also understands better than anyone else that it doesn’t have to be. And as modern cinema’s most unbounded storyteller has observed the siloification of life in the 21st century, it makes sense that he’s turned inward to understand why people are only growing further apart. A man-on-the-run thriller about a whistleblower who’s determined to reveal that the U.S. government has been lying to the public about aliens since Roswell, “Disclosure Day” might be pitched as a spiritual sequel to “Close Encounters,” but the movie itself — typically earnest and fantastic entertainment, as fluid in its direction as it can be clumsy with its ideas — is in far more immediate conversation with Spielberg’s recent films, which have reflected upon his legend with a candor and curiosity that’s as alien to the billionaire class as E.T. was from Earth. Similar to how “Ready Player One” allowed Spielberg to interrogate the merits of the modern blockbuster, and “The Fabelmans” saw him unpack how a single divorce shaped a half-century of American imagination, “Disclosure Day” finds him revisiting the singularly iconographic stuff of his own story to insist that we aren’t as far apart from each other as we might think. Even more rewardingly, it finds him wrestling with the burden of maintaining our collective faith in that idea, the full weight of which he’s only been able to understand, or to bear, by continuing to process it through the prism of his own experience.“I will not be anyone’s religion,” a character scoffs at a key moment in Spielberg’s latest movie, but someone has to uphold the world’s self-belief at a time when the people in power are so determined to snuff it out. If only proving that people aren’t alone in the universe was as easy as showing them an old surveillance video of [redacted historical figure] meeting an alien.~this review continues on IndieWire~
