Disclosure Day

spoilers!

I thought Disclosure Day was quite a lot of fun, but the best parts were the bits that did not involve aliens. It is something of a genre film checklist—bag drop, loading dock meeting, dramatic stand-off, steam from the pipes making the atmosphere tense, a dramatic car theft, a car chase, a safe house, burner satellite phones, motels, someone escaping from a window, an abandoned farm, high drama on a train, another car chase, and so on. That part of the movie was entertaining. But whenever aliens were on the screen, or were being discussed, it just wasn’t very good. For one thing, we are getting a lot of disclosures right now and… a lot of people don’t care. Spielberg is using Roswell-type aliens, not red orbs, but still. The whole plot is about a race to a TV studio to release the videos. The public is then shown watching them on their phones. Why not just put the videos online? This feels like a new world being poured into an old plot.

I take the ending to be deliberately ambiguous. The main theme of the film is that people only pay attention to what is happening right in front of them, right now. That is why the Korea/WWIII situation is always in the background. Everyone is paying attention to the “wrong” thing. So the alien disclosures have to be broadcast as an interruption to make people pay attention. But what they are then paying attention to… Spielberg leaves open! Have they missed the real war that was about to happen, or are they about to enter some empathy-based utopia as Hugo suggests? We don’t know.

The film’s theory of empathy is Humean. Emily Blunt can literally feel what other people feel; she reads their minds. But the film is not interested enough in the sinister implications of this. Colin Firth uses that power in a cruel way, but at the end he just gives in. Did Emily Blunt manipulate him with the “device” or did he just become nice because she reminded him of his wife? It’s lame either way! If the aliens who gave her this power are so empathetic, why do they need the device to perform that function?

At the point when Colin Firth gives in and lets Emily Blunt make the disclosures, the guy who tried to shoot her that afternoon just walks out in disgust, letting the disclosure happen. All of this comes right after Jane re-appears, walks through the middle of dozens of armed men, and hands Emily Blunt the device—these are the same people who have been chasing her for the whole film. That was the point of the plot.

So, when Emily Blunt then delivers a message from the alien, are we supposed to think that empathy has just been used as a means of take-over by the aliens? If so, how to make sense of the way the two main characters were “activated”? It makes sense that the aliens activated Josh O'Connor fifteen years ago so that he could infiltrate the archive of information about alien visits and release it. But why was Emily Blunt only activated two days ago? She is a TV weather girl, so she has access to the broadcasting system. But she was given her powers by the aliens when she was ten. The mathematical ability they gave to ten-year-old Josh O’Connor led him to his work, but her powers do not… so they either knew the future (nothing else in the movie suggests this) or they just got lucky. And what about Hugo? Is he so amenable to them because he was just a nice guy? Or did they get him too?

I watched the whole thing and had fun, but Close Encounters of the Third Kind this isn’t.