If nothing else Steven Spielberg’s return to science fiction is a barnstorming thriller, albeit one with many of the elements that have featured in barnstorming thrillers that have gone before.
It has a proper villain in the form of Colin Firth’s Noah Scanlon, the sinister boss of a secret US government department intent on keeping “the truth” from the public; it has a whistleblower in the form of Scanlon’s ex-employee Daniel (Josh O’Connor), a former cyber-criminal who wants to lift the lid on decades of Nazi-like wrongdoing such as murder and torture, and it has pulse-banging Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park-style chases, one involving an infinitely long American freight train which has to be boarded at high speed if certain death is to be avoided.
Most familiar of all, in a good way, is Emily Blunt’s TV weather forecaster Margaret Fairchild who, just like Richard Dreyfuss’s Roy in Spielberg’s 1977 thriller Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is mysteriously drawn by extraterrestrial forces into doing and saying things she can’t explain. Dreyfuss’s Roy sculpted a mud mountain in his kitchen; Blunt’s Margaret spontaneously speaks Russian and Korean.
Yes, this is in many ways classic Spielberg, right down to its John Williams score and David Koepp screenplay. Those who want to be transported back to the gripping, thrilling cinema that made this Jewish son of electrical engineer Arnold and pianist Leah (who also ran a kosher restaurant) the most influential filmmaker of his generation, will not be disappointed.
Though not officially a sequel to Close Encounters, Disclosure Day is intended as a “bookend” to that movie. ET’s spidery fingers get a look-in as well.
Yet as the breathless pace makes its frantic progress, with Daniel and Margaret’s parallel plot lines eventually converging in a race against Scanlon and his black-clad army, the impression builds that there is little here that we have not seen before. The grainy Area 57 revelations feel especially hoary.
Not that there is much time to dwell on such niggles. Rather, they occur after the film has finished as adrenaline levels recede. How, for instance has the control-freakery of Firth’s Scanlon suppressed the far more advanced aliens from achieving their goal of spreading their word to humanity? True, Scanlon has at his disposal one of the aliens’ pocket-sized gizmos that allows him to scarily insert himself into the minds of almost anyone he wants to control. But these otherworldly creatures have proper space ships and can shape-shift into gorgeous animals for fun (if they do fun).
What remains undiminished well after returning to daylight is Blunt, who after her rather bit-part turn in Devil Wears Prada 2 is superb, right down to the very last word in the film.
It arrives as a plea to ditch the anger that has so infected our species. It is worth waiting for and, in its humanity, is very Spielberg.
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