Have you ever wanted to wait two hours for aliens to not make a big reveal? This may be the movie for you. There were a lot of indications that this movie would rankle folks like myself who are allergic to “earnest” and need a little skepticism in their conspo theory thriller. Alas, Disclosure Day is full throttle childhood flashbacks and vibecore, a series of frenetic mind reading conversations that Emily Blunt powers through so well that some people have deliriously suggested she be nominated for an Oscar. Much of that talk seems focused on a specific “oner” scene, five minutes without any apparent cutaways, that happens while Blunt’s weather report goes off the rails spectacularly.
Spoilers ahead. The scene in question is lively and weird (and it features the inimitable bubblegum machine operator Ron Song from Season One of Jury Duty!) but it’s featured prominently in the trailers and also isn’t a oner by any generous definition of that term. Which is sort of symbolic of a lot of the movie more generally, an energetic rugpull of a story replete with car chases and a long-tailed chase that ends precisely where it started, not in a crafty “the end is the beginning” kind of way so much as a “we ran out of ideas” way. The movie is mostly car chases and long drives to a sort of Charlie Kaufman-esque studio where they need to relive a childhood trauma (?) in order to activate god-mode on Emily Blunt.
Basically anyone who has eyes who watches the last scene of the movie is going to have some big questions about how stupid the aliens who set up these twin receivers were as the alien whispers math into Josh O’Connor’s (who is NOT Jack O’Connell) ear so that he can then whisper it into Emily Blunt’s ear so that she can deliver the news… instead… of him? It’s not super clear, nor is it super clear why the villain of the movie, Colin Firth is such a tremendous pushover in almost every scene in the movie with the exception of the excellent interrogation mind control puppet scene in the farmhouse. At one point in the movie Emily Blunt literally walks into a secure military facility and rescues a guy under his nose and he doesn’t so much as lift a finger. Later, when he is successful at cutting power before the big broadcast and storms the studio where they’re going to tell the world the Truth, he abruptly sits down in an uncomfortable metal chair, lamenting his lack of lines left in the script presumably, and watches the montage of really chaotic broadcast control room people trying to haphazardly weave together gigabytes of footage in a five minute live show across multiple shows all over the world.
Probably the best thing about this movie was a promo for a documentary currently finding its way through the festival circuit When We Were Live, a documentary about public access television in 90s Austin. That clip along with a whole host of amazing finds are all available on their YT page and the footage of a chill dudebro cheerily asking Austin residents on the street about their beliefs in aliens is at once silly as they take the piss and also profound for all the ideas about their own lives that they wear on their sleeves, captured like lightning in a bottle.
