Movie Review: Disclosure Day

I was excited to see Spielberg take on the topic of disclosing the presence of extraterrestrials on Earth. That said, this was a clumsy, unentertaining movie.
 
Surprisingly, the score is quite bad. When done well, most people won't even notice a movie's music except during really intense scenes when it works well. I'm in that group. I mostly don't care about movie music. So, I was shocked when, at least three times in the movie, a music cue came up and just yanked me right out of the story.
 
Most importantly, there isn't much of a story. It amounts to a sort of Edward Snowden moment. A guy is working for a US government contractor who has a crisis of ethics that he plans to resolve by releasing all the cool UFO information that exists. And there are some bad guys--who don't kill or hurt anyone in frame--chasing him.
 
There are the elements of a tale in that, but the thing is that there are no stakes. If our guy fails in releasing the information, what consequences are there? None, other than the philosophical conundrum of what information a democratically run government is entitled to hide from its people. The main character might stand to get hurt, but even that's not clear. As a super-hacker, he can disappear fairly handily. So, there isn't much dramatic tension in this movie. Consequently, there is no sense of pace or suspense either.
 
I found it particularly galling that the US government wasn't part of any of it. The entire movie is about this one rogue guy running this one nasty company (Wardex). He has squads of guys around the country that run around doing all kinds of massively illegal stuff, and never runs afoul of any law enforcement or government entities. To me, that was a copout along the lines of, "Hey, I'm not accusing the government of anything, just these pesky contractors." It also kills the realism (verisimilitude…say that three times fast) of the movie in that these Wardex guys go tear-assing around the country without even a hint of government notice.
 
That is, if this movie isn't meant to entertain as a thriller, then it needs to harvest more entertainment from the geopolitics or the aliens. What is the government doing? What are the aliens doing? With the US government sidelined and the aliens themselves not providing anything to engage with, that makes the entire movie fall flat.
 
Towards the end, one of the subversive characters voices the heart of the movie: aliens consider empathy to be the great trait of a people, not technology or will to power or some other conventional attributes that most of us think make a people great. That's a nice thought, but of course, there are many purported alien abductees who have had horrible, traumatizing experiences caused by those aliens who apparently lack empathy. Part of the divide on alien thinking is the good vs. evil thing. Are they benevolent aliens or overlords? So for the movie to come out and hold up empathy as the key was an emotionally and intellectually fraught choice. They are all good, benign, Spielbergian aliens.
 
Once I heard that speech about empathy, the problems of the movie made sense to me. He's filmed what is supposed to be a thriller as an advocacy piece for empathy. So, the bad guys don't kill anyone in this movie. The protagonist is never even threatened with violence. His girlfriend isn't harmed. His family isn't harmed. It's like some kind of brain teaser: if a thriller is all about love and empathy, where is the dramatic tension? The answer for this movie is simple: there is none. And because there is nothing about the aliens revealed other than this philosophical whitewash of empathy, there is nothing to make up for the boring plot.
 
By the end of the movie, we have a timid, no one gets hurt story about how aliens are these benevolent, empathetic creatures whose existence is hidden from the public by unscrupulous government contractors. It closes with an old alien going on TV, as if that couldn't be written off as a CGI hoax. We don't even get to hear what it says, but ostensibly, that's supposed to wrap everything up in this movie. It didn't for me.
 
I am not sure why Spielberg made this movie, but it wasn't to entertain, just preach. And it is as bland and generic a sermon as you've ever heard. If you never see this movie, you won't have missed anything.