This is 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind writ very large.
Director Steven Spielberg’s original story — fleshed out by skilled genre screenwriter David Koepp — hits the ground running, and trusts viewers to catch up.
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| Despite being surrounded by shadowy agents with orders to apprehend them, each one unexpectedly steps aside as Margaret (Emily Blunt) and Daniel (Josh O'Connor) slowly walk toward potential freedom. |
This is made clear by the fact that Casper Boyd (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), Scanlon’s go-to “dirty work” field agent, kidnapped Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), in order to facilitate this exchange. It looks fairly cut and dried ... until Daniel raises a small, slender, metallic bipyramid that he holds in one carefully gloved hand.
Scanlon and all of his black-garbed associates carefully back away.
Daniel and Jane flee, which kicks off the first of this film’s several pell-mell chase sequences. They manage to escape, much to Scanlon’s vexation. (Firth displays an impressive level of barely controlled rage.) But how can they stayhidden, given all the high-tech surveillance resources available to Scanlon?
Meanwhile...
Chirpy Kansas City KCXE-TV news meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), after completing a day’s work, returns home to boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell), a low-stress musician and Fruit Loops-loving Everyman. The following morning, before she leaves for the morning shift, they’re startled when a red cardinal flies in an open window and perches on the kitchen table.
And stares at her. She stares back, trance-like, Blunt’s expression suddenly a blank, wordless slate.
Shaking herself from this fugue, she rushes off to work. After arriving at KCXE, she suddenly starts speaking in foreign languages ... including, as this scene’s uneasy atmosphere builds, a series of guttural clicks, burps and grunts that don’t sound the slightest bit human.
Shortly thereafter, she feels a strange, strong pull to go “somewhere else,” much to Jackson’s bewilderment. Somewhere north.
Throughout scenes with these two sets of characters, disturbing radio reports and TV news broadcasts warn of the rapidly increasing probability of a world-wide nuclear war. The threat level jumps to DEFCON 2.
Daniel’s movements are being guided remotely by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), apparently orchestrating some sort of elaborate endgame; they communicate via burner phones that are discarded after each call. Whenever the camera cuts to Hugo, people behind him are busily building some sort of elaborate structure.
Hugo is one of a dozen or so WARDEX employees who abruptly failed to show up for work a few days earlier, leading Scanlon to suspect some sort of coordinated plan. Daniel, we soon learn, is a tech whiz formerly employed as a WARDEX cyber-security expert; ultimately, his troubled conscience — over what has been concealed — prompted him to follow Hugo’s lead.
Ah, but it goes deeper than that.
While not wanting to spoil this story’s many complexities, the film’s trailer makes the key plot point abundantly clear: For the past 80 years, WARDEX has been concealing all sorts of evidence concerning the arrival of “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” (UAPs) and extraterrestrial visitors to Earth.
Daniel’s stolen footage, copied onto computer thumb drives, reads like a laundry list of what has long captivated UFO True Believers: Roswell, Area 51, commercial pilot sightings, and everything else Spielberg and Koepp gleefully lifted from Frank Edwards’ popular books, Stranger Than Science, Flying Saucers — Here and Now and several others.
(I devoured those books as a teenager. Not because I believed anything within, but because they were such preposterous fun to read.)
Mind-bending as that is, though, it’s just the tip of Spielberg and Koepp’s narrative iceberg.
Blunt persuasively conveys poor Margaret’s mounting confusion, along with a rising level of terror that accompanies her inability to control any of this. At the same time, Margaret’s interactions with the increasingly confused Jackson become quite funny, thanks to Russell’s wide-eyed, gape-mouthed protests.
O’Connor’s Daniel is frequently frightened and overwhelmed, but unexpectedly courageous when necessary. He seems the last person in the world to be assigned responsibility for what Hugo demands, which (of course) makes Daniel’s snap resourcefulness more interesting.
Firth’s insincere smile and dark gaze make Scanlon malevolence personified. The lengths to which he eventually goes, in order to get what he wants, become increasingly creepy and chilling.
Hewson actually has the most fascinating and complex role. As a former nun, Jane’s spiritual side remains strong; she serves as the story’s conscience, framing the core conflict in the broader, overall context of human existence. Despite having left the order, Jane’s faith remains key to her moral compass, and Hewson’s performance — as that faith is tested — is wrenching, terrifying and heartbreaking.
Domingo makes Hugo an intriguing blend of father figure and methodical architect of what eventually is revealed as an incredibly high-stakes gamble. Lloyd-Hughes’ Boyd is an implacable hunter and stone-cold killer. He’s matched, on the good guy spectrum, by Tommy Martinez’s Santiago, Hugo’s most trusted true believer.
Adam Stockhausen’s varied production design is sensational, from the massive WARDEX war room; to Hugo’s fascinating, what-is-going-on headquarters; and even to the minute details within the deserted farmhouse and roadside motel room where Daniel and Jane briefly take refuge. Similar care went into the fabricated “archival footage,” which looks quite authentic.
Spielberg deftly plays with our emotions throughout. One of his most chilling scenes occurs when Margaret and Jackson pause for gas and provisions, amid scores of terrified locals scrambling to stock up on everything from the attached grocery store.
Special effects supervisor Daniel Sudick and stunt coordinator Brian Machleit do herculean work, particularly during a breathtaking sequence that bridges the this story’s two distinct chapters. John Williams’ score is initially restrained and subtly ominous ... until it suddenly isn’t, as the final act kicks into gear.
Although the climax relies on one highly unlikely coincidence, that’s a minor quibble. Disclosure Day definitely is one of Spielberg’s most thoughtful and ambitious films, and it deserves to find a wide audience.
And the final scene sure is cheeky.
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