It was the first alien that worried me. A quarter of the way through Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, Josh O’Connor’s on-the-run IT guy presents his girlfriend with a surveillance video he’s stolen from his former employers. “This might be hard to watch,” he tells her, of what we quickly learn is more or less an alien snuff film. We see brief glimpses of an ET strapped to a table, as humans prod at it with what look to be electrical implements until it presumably expires. Cut to a stricken Eve Hewson taking all of this footage in, her face lined with tears, her mouth quivering. She is stunned. Emotional. Suddenly questioning everything. I… cringed a bit.
Disclosure Day is full of little moments like this that seem designed to inspire awe and empathy, but which I greeted with a kind of cold, cynical detachment. This isn’t about CGI or animatronic creations, I should add. I’m sure I wouldn’t like to see Baby Yoda get waterboarded. Very well might cry, even. But there’s a recurring dissonance in Disclosure Day between the weepy histrionics of the characters in the film – who are witnessing things that absolutely blow their tiny human minds – and what I felt, which was usually nothing.
