Spielberg's 'Disclosure Day' Is the Best-Made Movie of the Summer, and a Half-Step Too Sure of Itself to Soar

Steven Spielberg has never opened an original movie this big. "Disclosure Day," his first film since "The Fabelmans" and the 37th feature he has directed, debuted at number one with $44 million at home and $93 million worldwide. That is the largest opening of his career for a title not pulled from a book, a comic, or an existing franchise. It earned back its reported budget in eight days.

Then the second weekend came and the floor gave out. Down 60% domestically, off to a worldwide total now around $171 million, the kind of slide you see on a movie people respected more than they repeated to their friends.

That gap is the review. "Disclosure Day" is the best-made studio picture of the summer, and it spends two and a half hours being a half-step too sure of itself to leave a mark.

What it is

Emily Blunt plays a Kansas City TV meteorologist who is in the middle of a live weather hit when something not of this Earth reaches through the moment and takes hold of her. Josh O'Connor is a true believer convinced the government has been sitting on proof of alien life. The two of them end up running from the people who would rather the truth stay buried. The studio's own logline puts the stakes plainly: if someone proved we were not alone, would that frighten you?

Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo and Wyatt Russell round out the ensemble. David Koepp, who wrote "Jurassic Park" and "War of the Worlds" for Spielberg, handled the script. John Williams wrote the music, because of course he did. It runs about two hours and twenty-five minutes, rated PG-13, out through Universal and Amblin.

The craft is not in question

Hand Spielberg a camera and the man still has no peer. The Associated Press's Lindsey Bahr said he is "on fire," praised set pieces that are "old fashioned, tactile and delightfully sane, from car chases to a thrilling sequence involving a train," and called the Williams score the kind "that may produce goose bumps." She is right on all three counts.

Blunt is the engine. Variety's Owen Gleiberman, who was not sold on the movie, still credited her with a turn that "makes you feel she's seeing the uncanny." The early-reaction crowd was a good deal louder than that.

That is the heat the film opened on. The box office tells you how quickly it cooled.

Where it stalls

Here is the catch, and most of the critics who held back landed on a version of it. The movie knows exactly what it believes, tells you, and then tells you again. Gleiberman called it a "thriller docudrama that's too cut-and-dried about what it believes," and noted that "for all the film's slow build it doesn't take us anywhere overly surprising." Justin Chang, in The New Yorker, walked out "dispiritingly dry-eyed," and wrote the sharpest line of the bunch: the film blurs the line "between phoning home and phoning it in."

They have a point. Spielberg's great alien pictures, "Close Encounters" and "E.T.," left room for awe you could not quite explain. This one explains. Every mystery gets an answer, every bit of wonder gets a thesis statement, and the spell never fully takes. You can admire "Disclosure Day" frame by frame and forget it by the time you reach the parking lot.

The split shows up in the numbers: 80% of critics positive with a 7.2 average, a 74 on Metacritic, and an audience score of 71% that, for a Spielberg spectacle, is the polite version of a shrug.

To be fair to the other camp, plenty of serious critics think the restraint is the whole point. The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney called it a "return to what he does best." The New York Times' Manohla Dargis found its "maximalism is coherent and strategic." If you want a grown-up summer movie made by the best to ever do it, this is the one on the marquee.

The box office tell

A 60% second-weekend drop on a well-reviewed Spielberg original is not a flop. It is a message. Audiences turned up for the name and the reviews, and then they did not march anyone else to the theater. That is what a movie looks like when it earns respect and stops short of love, and it matches the thing the picture does on screen: it impresses you, then declines to haunt you.

The verdict

"Disclosure Day" is a clinic in how to build a studio movie, and a reminder that craft and wonder are not the same thing. Go for Blunt. Go for the train sequence. Go for one more John Williams score while we still have him. Just do not walk in expecting to come out changed.

BCN Score: 78 / 100. Gorgeous, confident, grown-up, and a half-step too sure of itself to soar.