Emily Blunt in a Spielberg movie is already enough to get me in the theater, but Disclosure Day is doing something I genuinely didn't expect. She plays a meteorologist in the Pacific Northwest who starts experiencing things she can't explain. Weather patterns she predicted years ago are suddenly happening in reverse. Strange lights in the sky that no satellite can account for. And then she gets a call from someone inside the government telling her to stop looking into it.
Spielberg has been talking about wanting to return to the kind of filmmaking he did with Close Encounters and E.T., and this feels like that promise delivered. The trailer has this incredible shot of Blunt standing alone on a rooftop watching the sky change color while everyone around her is running. She doesn't move. That's the whole movie right there.
The cast is stacked too. Josh Hartnett plays a cybersecurity expert who becomes a whistleblower after discovering classified files about extraterrestrial contact. He and Blunt don't meet until the second act, but when they do, their scenes together are apparently the highlight of the film. Colman Domingo shows up as a government official who might be helping them or might be the one trying to shut everything down.
Critics who've seen early screenings are calling it Blunt's best performance. One review said she does more with silence in this movie than most actors do with a full monologue. Spielberg reportedly did over 40 takes on one scene where she just stands in the rain and looks up. That kind of obsessive detail is what separates his work from everyone else trying to make big movies right now.
The score is by John Williams, which is significant because he keeps saying he's retiring. If this is actually his last collaboration with Spielberg, it's going to hit different knowing that. The main theme already leaked online and it sounds like vintage Williams, the kind of melody that makes you feel like a kid watching the sky for the first time.
If you're planning to see this, do yourself a favor and rewatch Close Encounters of the Third Kind first. Not because Disclosure Day is a sequel or anything, but because the two movies are clearly in conversation with each other. Spielberg is asking the same questions he asked in 1977, just with 50 more years of life behind the camera.
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