Steven Spielberg’s controversial Disclosure Day will enrage the conspiracy theorists

There’s a particular point during Steven Spielberg’s new summer blockbuster Disclosure Day that sent chills up my spine.

It will also do the same for alien conspiracy theorists, but likely for different reasons.

While always entertaining, it’s also complex and controversial and hard in some ways to place among his remarkable back catalogue.   

But Spielberg is too talented a filmmaker to produce a bad movie. And Disclosure Day absolutely isn’t one – but it is going to split audiences, given its unwillingness to give us that much that’s cut and dried.

And anyone plugged into the grid of conspiracy theorists who believe the US government secretly feeds Hollywood information about major events before they’re revealed to help acclimatise the public to the possibility? Well, they will no doubt leave convinced that this film was created to condition audiences for a future alien announcement. 

Brace yourself for the veritable feeding frenzy to follow on online forums, despite Spielberg denying any outside influence on his original story, brought to life once again by screenwriter David Koepp.

There’s also been murmurs that Disclosure Day is a sequel to Spielberg’s 1977 sci-fi classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind; it’s not, but the director does consider it a ‘thematic bookend’ to that film.

Obviously, we’re in similar extra-terrestrial territory once more, a fact alone that comes with plenty of anticipation thanks to Spielberg’s track record in this realm also including E.T.

Disclosure Day, which should most accurately be thought of as a sci-fi action movie, presents a lot of the reassuring nostalgia associated with its director.

We’re plunged straight into the action of a tense hand-off between whistleblowing cyber-security expert Daniel Kilner (Josh O’Connor) and the forces of Wardex, his former employer and a shadowy agency that protects decades’ worth of secrets about non-human entities and their visits to earth.

As its steely CEO Noah Scanlan (Colin Firth) sees it, the archive he protects – and Kilner threatens – is ‘a virus against which the world has zero immunity’ once any of its contents are released. Quite simply, we’re not prepared for the fallout.

There are comforting Spielbergian signs from the beginning: baddies in black leather gloves and a stirring and gloriously old-school John Williams score, which builds a delicious atmosphere and proves, that at 94, the composer has lost none of his prowess.

Helped from afar by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), another Wardex abscondee, Kilner is forced to go on the run with his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), who it transpires has also been keeping secrets from him.

Meanwhile Kansas City meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) has been having a very weird morning, much to the befuddlement of her laidback boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell), after an up-close encounter with a red cardinal leaves her spouting fluent Russian – and then reading the mind of the police officer who pulls her over for speeding on the way to work.

Her subsequent clicking, stuttering episode on live TV then draws the beady eye of Wardex upon her too when they match those utterances to a language in their database, leading her to flee as well with her vast new-found knowledge.

But Scanlan is never far behind thanks to the alien-enhanced technology Wardex has managed to build, allowing him to pursue his targets through their minds as well as on the ground.

The beauty of Disclosure Day is seeing how we reach that inevitable moment promised by the film’s title, alongside discovering what unknown force links Margaret and Killner.

It’s also in the fact the film is never above pausing for a well-placed moment of comedy to make fun of film tropes, such as Jackson’s inability to run over his girlfriend’s phone and destroy it when asked.

We’re also treated to non-stop pursuit and some great stunt spectacle – especially in a sequence between a car and a train – while Wardex’s dogged chasing (especially from Henry Lloyd-Hughes’ henchman Casper) fondly recalls the shady government forces hellbent on capturing E.T.

The acting, across the board, is exceptional – but especially from Blunt and O’Connor, whose characters we only get to know bit by bit, and leave us still with many questions by the film’s final act.

For a longer movie it also keeps up the pace, catching me off guard at the end as I still thought there was a good half hour to go of the movie’s 145-minute runtime.

Its finale left me with tingles when the big reveal finally came, so well has Spielberg built up to the pay-off in terms of tension and unpredictability. But be warned – if you want a neat finish with every answer given then you’re watching the wrong film. Many in that camp will be enraged by the ending.

Perhaps Spielberg left a lot unexplained for a sequel, but I think it’s more likely a deliberate prompt for the fierce discussions that will inevitably follow.

It’s true there is a haziness to Disclosure Day, including its final few minutes, which I’m not sure I’d let another director get away with so easily. But there are so many reassuring hallmarks throughout of his mastery of movies – from pacing and plot to action and adversaries – that I could thoroughly enjoy the journey without a clear destination.

Disclosure Day is in UK cinemas from tomorrow before releasing internationally on Friday.

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