Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is not alone in the universe. It is now joined by another sci-fi about Earth’s first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life in the form of a high-concept, low-risk, talky drama from writer-director Jonathan Sobol. It stars Isabelle Fuhrman as Dr Annika Cask, a brilliant young computer scientist, already famous for taking the first photograph of dark matter.
Predictably for this kind of film, Annika has a tragic backstory (the death in childhood of her sister) which drives her single mindedness and has left her with a deep sense of the fragility of life. She takes a job for brash tech billionaire Dennis Quaid, working on a top-secret project on his private island in the Caribbean. On the helicopter she’s joined by another wonder-kid, electronics engineer Charlie (Josh Hutcherson). The pair have been recruited to keep an eye on the even more brilliant Perry Glassner (David Thewlis), who has invented a device called Littlemouth, a fancy-looking mini-pylon designed to communicate with other life in the universe. Glassner is an unbalanced narcissist, played by Thewlis in style of his character Johnny in Mike Leigh’s Naked: all fear and rage, though channelled this time through a PhD in quantum physics. Here he is on a rant about humanity: “Petty, cruel, prone to self-destruction, hellbent on rage-fucking our habitat out of existence.”
