Title: Disclosure Day
MPA Rating: PG-13
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth
Runtime: 2 hrs 25 mins
What It Is: When a weather woman Margaret Fairchild (Blunt) at a Kansas City television station suddenly breaks out into gibberish it unravels into a government conspiracy that goes far beyond anything we know. Simultaneously Dr. Daniel Kellner (O’Connor) is being chased by a shadow organization tasked with keeping the truth hidden from everyday America. When he begins to leak information it will inevitably lead to his necessary escape. When Kellner’s girlfriend Jane (Hewson) is compromised by the same organization that’s after Daniel what gets revealed will forever change the world.
What We Think: This is very clearly not Spielberg’s best work. Clocking in at an absurd 145 minutes this thing slogs throughout. Blunt and O’Connor are excellent. Spielberg is doing good work. He’s just really sort of let down by the hubris of his own legendary CV. This had a chance to be so good. All the ingredients were there. Unfortunately they never coalesce into anything really worth a damn. Science fiction is a genre I do not take lightly. I love new ideas and ways of storytelling within that genre. This is old hat film making from the guy who wrote the book on all of it.
Our Grade: C-, It’s not good enough to be remembered and not bad enough to be memorable. A stellar cast is ruined by a complex and dumb script that wants to be witty but doesn’t have the constitution to get the job done. I don’t know what Spielberg is doing here but whatever it is it certainly is not working. This is such a disappointment and a skip. It wanted to be liked and I wanted to like it but sadly two and two did not equal four here.
