“Disclosure Day” Movie Review | The New Yorker

Margaret, following her nutty North Star wherever it leads, would have been right at home in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), in which U.F.O. sightings make enraptured believers of a select few. But that’s hardly the only Spielberg joint that gets revisited. A reference to Roswell harks back to the extraterrestrial shenanigans of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2009), which, like this film, was written by David Koepp. (He also co-wrote “War of the Worlds,” another alien saga.) When Margaret begins using her telepathic powers, you might flash back to Agatha from “Minority Report,” spouting oracular warnings at every stranger who crosses her path. At times, the new movie recalls Spielberg’s journalistic thriller, “The Post” (2017), which likewise hinges on the dissemination of information that, the powers that be caution, would pose a grave threat to national security.

The real menace here isn’t the aliens—prototypically gray-green, pear-headed beings who, in our occasional glimpses of them, look vulnerable, even frail—but, Scanlon suggests, humanity itself, which is far too hubristic and divided to handle the knowledge of their existence. He and his wardex colleagues have turned this foul conviction into a self-fulfilling prophecy: for decades, they have subjected aliens to unspeakable acts of torture, and then hidden evidence of those abuses. You may well think of “E.T.” (1982), with its rather rosier vision of an outer-space visitor being held against its will. These close encounters, by contrast, have been anything but kind.

In February, former President Barack Obama made waves when, during an interview with the YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen, he said that aliens are “real, but I haven’t seen them.” (He later clarified, in an Instagram post: “I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”) Hours after the interview was posted, Donald Trump rebuked Obama for revealing “classified information”—then, not to be out-revealed, said that his Administration would release government files related to U.F.O.s and U.A.P.s, or unidentified anomalous phenomena. Last month, the Pentagon published a tranche of “new, never-before-seen” images, with the promise of more to come, though the initial evidence has been generally deemed too vague to be conclusive.

Reality, then, has provided its share of free publicity for “Disclosure Day,” but it might be equally fair to say that it has let the air out of the movie’s tires. The tread is a bit worn, in any case. Ostensibly set in the present, with many grim, furrowed-brow references to a Third World War on the horizon, the film plays like a throwback to summer entertainments from earlier decades—and not just because the title evokes “Independence Day” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” two foundational science-fiction blockbusters of the nineties. Koepp’s screenplay samples everything from the sinister government conspiracies of “The X-Files” to the crop-circle mysteries of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs” (2002). There’s even a certain nostalgia, verging on naïveté, in the prominent narrative positioning of Margaret’s Kansas City news station. It’s touching to think that Daniel and Margaret’s revolution might be televised— or that American broadcast news, a medium as existentially threatened as it is politically polarized, might turn out to be a vital, globally unifying force.

In the end, Koepp’s script exaggerates the best and the worst of how humans might respond to such a revelation, and Spielberg struggles to split the difference between paranoid-thriller cynicism and his usual mode of emotional uplift. That waffling ultimately strands “Disclosure Day” on a heartfelt yet fuzzy middle ground, with a generalized plea for cross-species understanding that, even bolstered by the reliable stirrings of a John Williams score, left me dispiritingly dry-eyed. Domingo’s Hugo, saddled with one of the movie’s windier monologues, argues for “empathy as an evolutionary advantage.” Rather more persuasive is a peripheral character, Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), a Catholic nun who articulates a benevolently progressive view of faith. The existence of extraterrestrial life, she insists, does not negate the existence of God; it confirms that God is, like the universe he created, infinitely greater than humans realize. (It could be the script’s most topical and intellectually provocative thread, given what the Times’ Ruth Graham has called the “unsettling theological implications” of Trump’s alien-data dump for the conservative Christians who form much of his base.)