This is a very silly movie. Quite a lot of care and craft has been applied to make it seem otherwise, but it only works for so long. Eventually you have to concede the more you know about the movie's plot, the less interesting it is. The movie's best scene is its first: the use of in medias res to set up the hero, the girl, the villain, the weapon, and the stakes in one minute flat is as efficient as Soderbergh. But almost everything following from that is either goofy, a cliche, or predictable.
All I found interesting here was how the movie is incoherent: its themes, paper thin but held sincerely, are at odds with its need to be a crowd pleaser, and that leads the film to undermine itself at every turn. In Colman Domingo's big speech, he boils down the aliens' message to something like 'empathy above all'. He even puts empathy in pseudo-scientific terms as a perpetual evolutionary advantage, confusing evolution with progression, inadvertently condemning pretty well all animal species as unfit for survival, while also kinda admitting to a lack of faith in empathy's virtues such that it needs to be recommended in terms of pure self interest. But I digress. So Domingo has learned of the absolute power of empathy, and the movie reinforces this by ending with a command to 'listen', and yet in Domingo's big scene he does none of the above. He tells Colin Firth what Firth's motivations are, explains why they're wrong, and proceeds to explain what the real truth of the universe is without any indication it's provisional. Whatever Firth's fears, concerns, or ideas, they're steamrolled. Domingo delivers a sermon to a party whose ideas he has no interest in entertaining.
This happens throughout. Josh O'Connor gets an earful of fascist logic got up as religious concerns by Eve Hewson, and O'Connor barely listens, hand waves it away as obviously wrong, and...the movie backs him up on this, or at least never has him face consequences for his failure to listen to another person, consider another point of view. Russell's endless failures to listen to Blunt, to her and our increasing annoyance, proves he's a fool who doesn't deserve her, yet her refusal to listen back to what are legitimate concerns never signals anything about her, never undermines any of her positions. She is just treated as correct and worth listening to, and that's the end of it. There's a pattern: when the heroes (Blunt, O'Connor, Domingo) aren't listened to, it's a disaster. When the villains aren't listened to, that's good. The final image directs the movie's message at us, but throughout the runtime its message is directed solely at Colin Firth and, to a lesser extent, Russell. We're left to infer that empathy and listening are only a problem for people who don't have the truth, while those who do are righteous and do no wrong. Not good and bad actions, but good and bad people. This is incoherent. As an added bonus, the movie has a character whose journey is to realize that the truth is only acceptable so long as it doesn't interfere with dogma, which fits neither the overt listening/empathy argument nor the covert 'accept the truth, whatever it is, because it's always righteous' argument. So there's one more incoherence added on top.
I can tell what's happened: because the film aspires to be mass entertainment, it needs clear cut heroes and villains, which means an opposition of ideas in which one side is correct and the other is not. A good bet if you want to please a crowd, but not a place for either ambivalence or ambiguity, two things crucial to non-judgmental listening and to seeing things from someone else's point of view. So we get a movie that embeds a message of 'empathy above all' in a story where empathy is not necessary. And which culminates not in a moment of exchange, but a message of truth being broadcast and passively received. Like, I'm hard pressed to think of a movie less interested in characters exchanging viewpoints, and its whole theme is we should be open to sharing viewpoints!
The kicker is that we also have a movie about listening and empathy that is mostly uninterested in its characters. The people here are flat, a set of attitudes attended by one or two basic concepts they can deliver when the plot needs them to. No one really bothers to find out anything about each other, and when we do find out anything, it's at the level of plot. Even Eve Hewson's revelation about being a novitiate is there only for narrative tension over her mixed motives, a thing the movie over-determines by having the bad guy literally possess her. Even Blunt's total empathy is a parlour trick, a bit of mind reading, done inadvertently and convenient for getting her out of jams, but seeming to offer no greater awareness of humanity. Seeing into other people's minds wigs her out but doesn't change her consciousness. I guess this is an example of the movie's idea of empathy as merely evolutionary advantage, as Blunt's ability only affects her chances of survival, not her thoughts or character.
I'm baffled people are comparing this to Close Encounters. Both are Spielberg movies that have aliens, and that's it. They resemble each other as much as they resemble E.T. and Indy 4. Close Encounters is not really about aliens, anyway, but is a character study in obsession, monomania, and the stresses sudden personality changes put on families. It's a really good, really empathetic portrait of a man's undergoing a drastic personality change, focused almost solely on what its central characters think and feel. Disclosure Day is a sci-fi adventure story that shows no interest in its characters outside of the details that can advance the plot. They are flat people, reduced to one or two ideas, with one or two key experiences in their lives, and that's all. Nothing they say to each other on a personal level is transformative or revealing, and coming to know each other better doesn't change anyone as human beings. Maybe the exception is Colin Firth, tho' it's hard to distinguish his final change of heart from simple resignation. Either way, these characters don't talk with each other, they talk at each other, and all truth flows one way. The movie renders its entire thematic apparatus a total joke.
