Disclosure Day

Worst poster ever?

Don't worry about this movie being Important, and just strap in for the biggest, most expensive, best-directed X-Files movie you'll ever see. That's all this is. Our unlikely heroes, thrown into peril, one by chance, one by choice, are chased across the countryside by the Men In Black, driving black SUVs, who are always almost catching up. (okay they're not the same MIB as the movie franchise, but this movie is about the 75 year history of the US government covering up the existence of aliens. If they walk like a duck, and wear all black like a duck...)

All I ever ask for is something I've never seen before, and I expect a lot from Stephen Spielberg. The best innovation here is how "Wardex" chief Noah (Colin Firth) uses a mysterious object to "dive" into other people's consciousness, kinda sorta mentally forcing them to spill their guts, in the creepiest way possible.

Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor are both great, although I found Blunt's American accent distracting. Maybe I just know her English accent too well?

I was puzzled why Spielberg cast Eve Hewson as O'Connor's girlfriend, and made her look as short and frumpy as possible. She is a former candidate to become a nun, so maybe she's a modest young woman, but instead she looks middle-aged and ill. 

I don't like Wyatt Russell. I don't think he's a good actor. His whole attitude screams "unreliable" and "unfaithful", and that makes him a bad choice for Emily Blunt's confused guitarist boyfriend. By the way, Russell turns 40 this year, what are we supposed to make of a 39-year-old musician struggling to gig twice a week in Kansas City? He comes across like fellow Marvel alum Chris Pratt's character on Parks and Recreation - except Chris Traeger was 29 when that show started, not 39.  Is my perspective colored by the fact that Russell played a morally deficient Captain America substitute in the Marvel Universe, maybe, but the peril of casting a breakout star is that you're getting their breakout role in your audiences' heads.

His camera movement, as always, is impeccable. I especially liked Colin Firth's introduction - he's seen facing away from the camera, through a car window dappled with raindrops that looks like a field of stars. His action sequences are terrific, although he still resorts to a couple tropes I am fully sick of:

• In car chases, the pursuer shoots the rearview mirror of the target car while the hero is looking in it;
• In train sequences, trains that approach an object in the road don't try and stop, they just lean on the horn over and over;
• This was the fastest moving freight train I've ever seen. Do trains outside of New England really go 30-40-50 mph?

The New theater 1 at the Triplex
and its new seating

I am fully sick of Janusz Kaminski pointing lights directly into the camera. Every time that happens, I think "Janusz Kaminski", not about the story. His penchant for glowing sets filled with mineral oil seems to have abated, but the lens flares are embarrassing.

I am fully sick of the good guys never thinking two steps ahead of the bad guys. Why can't we, the audience, enjoy some subversion of expectations by allowing the good guys, led by Colman Domingo, to anticipate the moves of the bad guys, like, ever?

An old man's remake of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (made when Spielberg was 31), Disclosure Day both shows more and tells less than his original paranoid consipiracy thriller about the government coverup of aliens on Earth. He's still got the chops to make exciting movies, just don't expect too much more than a great X-Files movie.

NOTE: This is my son's third Spielberg movie in the theater after re-releases of Raiders and Jurassic Park, and the first new Spielberg movie! It's my 22nd, see the total list here!