In “Disclosure Day,” Steven Spielberg Steps Out from Behind the Curtain

The director, who is seventy-nine, had had two commercial flops in a row, “West Side Story” and “The Fabelmans.” He must have been beginning to wonder whether, if the new film proved to be another failure, he would still be able to command the ample budgets that his spectacular adventures require. After seeing the trailer for “Disclosure Day,” which advertised an alien-arrival story, I figured that Spielberg would be returning to familiar turf and serving up a crowd-pleasing intergalactic meatball. Instead, he bet big on a fundamental value that’s all the more crucial for being too rare in blockbusters: directorial delight. With “Disclosure Day,” he has delivered something akin to Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman”: just as Scorsese’s mighty latter-year Mob drama is no mere retread of his earlier gangland forays but a comprehensive revision of them, so does Spielberg’s project boldly reconfigures outer-space tropes, and not just his own. The movie thrums with his excitement in bringing his own new perspective to the screen, and with the audiovisual verve that doing so inspired in him.

There’s an intrinsic pleasure in seeing filmmakers grow both older and weirder, yielding to their personal idiosyncrasies and obsessions, taking wild chances in pursuit of their passions. Spielberg’s vision in “Disclosure Day” suggests audacity, even recklessness, two qualities that have often been wanting in his movies. There’s a sense of freedom, of a work pulled from deep within, that in some ways seems even more personal than the memoir-like “The Fabelmans.” This is one of the few films that Spielberg seems to have made without quite knowing what it would look like or how it would turn out. It contains a tangle of conflicting subplots and strange situations, somehow squeezed into a story that’s just coherent enough. There are some defects—including instances of garish taste, vain virtuosity, and a modicum of commercial calculation—but they don’t dispel the over-all sense of urgency and wonder.

Josh O’Connor plays Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity specialist with a stash of top-secret data on a collection of drives in a backpack. He’s about to pass off the goods to a clandestine contact—at a crowded pro-wrestling match—when, instead, he’s waylaid by paramilitary personnel and ordered to follow them if he wants to see his girlfriend, Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), alive again. The operatives take the drives and release Jane, who is bruised and bloodied. Then, rushing to Daniel’s side, she slips him a black, coffin-shaped stick that bestows fearsome powers on whoever grasps it. Daniel uses it to threaten the operatives, recover the backpack, and stage-manage their escape. The information, which Daniel was hired to protect but now wants to disclose, is footage providing conclusive evidence of the arrival of aliens on Earth, in 1947, and of a seventy-nine-year coverup, with government complicity, by a company called WARDEX, headed by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). Daniel is part of a well-organized group of former WARDEX employees, led by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who’ve decided that, as Daniel says, “people have a right to know the truth.” Hugo dissuades him—for unstated reasons that eventually prove pivotal—from putting the material online. Instead, Daniel must evade capture by WARDEX and reach Hugo to deliver the batch of drives, and the information on them must then make it out to the world.