Spielberg's 'Disclosure Day' Wins Mostly Favourable Reviews but Less Than $116 Million in US
Critics generally praised the film and singled out Emily Blunt's lead performance, while one Washington Examiner review located the start of Spielberg's decline in his four most recent films.
Earlier this summer, Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day came and went in cinemas and, on one Washington Examiner account, few cared. Anyone who did bother to show up saw the story of a heroine, played by Emily Blunt, fighting off government officials. The film has since moved to streaming, available on Amazon Prime and other platforms, having taken in less than $116 million in the United States to date, according to the same paper.
The premise, as The UFO Chronicles describes it, is a dramatisation of an effort to release decades of repressed files and media about UAPs. The story is fictional, but the plot draws on years of real-world effort by those who consider such repression inappropriate, and the outlet reports that expectations were high given the subject's profundity. A Washington Examiner piece sets the film beside Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): both, it says, predicted a day in the not too distant future when the cover-ups and conspiracies surrounding alleged extraterrestrial life have ended — when the world would finally possess undisputed proof that human beings were not the only intelligent life in the universe.
Critical reception has been largely favourable, The UFO Chronicles reports. Reviewers described the film as a blockbuster that manages emotional and thematic depth without sacrificing entertainment, with several singling out Emily Blunt's performance and the film's underlying faith in human goodness as its strongest elements. On craft alone, the outlet judges, that praise is earned. Its headline — 'Great Cinema, Convenient Omissions' — nonetheless signals reservations about omissions which the opening section of the piece does not set out.
A second Washington Examiner piece is a review that measures the film against the director's earlier work. 'Like a shark hunter who has lost track of the shark, or an adventurer unable to locate the Ark of the Covenant, Steven Spielberg has been drifting for the better part of the decade,' it opens, invoking Jaws (1975) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and naming Empire of the Sun (1987) as what the reviewer considers his masterpiece. The review suggests that his four most recent films are a logical place to mark the start of a decline; among them it names The Post (2017), which it calls a particularly lame example of legacy media cheerleading, and Ready Player One (2018), which it calls a devastating concession to pernicious forces in modern movies, including CGI and video games.
Whether the subject still holds audiences is the question another Washington Examiner piece asks outright. It records that a film predicting the end of cover-ups and the arrival of undisputed proof was generally praised by critics and yet flopped. On screen, a heroine fends off officials; in the auditorium, by that account, the seats were largely empty.