Are They Even Trying?Everything Wrong with the Disclosure Day Script

As a Spielberg superfan, I don’t think there was a movie that I was more excited for this year than Disclosure Day. Spielberg’s back doing alien shit, David Koepp is writing the screenplay, and the cast is stacked from top to bottom. I went into this thing genuinely thinking I might leave with it being my favorite movie ever. That’s how excited I was. And then…I watched it. Suffice it to say, the movie was…bad. If I had tomatoes, I would have thrown them. Even my girlfriend, who tries to find the best in every movie I drag her to, leaned over to me halfway through the film and asked: “Does this movie suck?” Yes, babe. Unfortunately, it sucks. And now that I’ve been able to sit on it for a few months (and properly grieve Spielberg’s GOAT status), I’ve finally figured out why: the script.

The general premise was great: a computer hacker steals all of the government’s files on alien life with the goal of releasing them to the public. But after watching the film, it became quite clear that was all Spielberg had really thought of. That, and maybe the last ten minutes, which actually felt like vintage Spielberg and were quite enjoyable. Looking at the credits, Spielberg apparently came up with the story, and Koepp wrote the screenplay. So if I had to guess how the writing process went down, I would say Spielberg gave Koepp the premise and the ending and said, “fill in the blanks and leave room for some car chases”. And he certainly did just that. But man, did it stink. And in this article, I’m going to explain why and how, and emphasize that even when you’re Hollywood elite, you gotta remember the basics.

Bad Guys in Suits

Before I dive into the criticisms, I will admit that the origin of the “bad guys” organization was pretty cool: after Nixon showed a celebrity some dead alien bodies in an attempt to impress him, the government decided to take away the President’s access to alien files altogether and put them in the hands of a private company. Sounds cool until you see who works there: bad guys in suits. Yes, just bland, evil guys in suits, looking at big screens and yelling things at their boss, who is also a bland, evil guy in a suit looking at a big screen. This sort of thing worked with Close Encounters and E.T., but it’s not the 80’s anymore, Stevie! When people nowadays go to your movies, they expect to see antagonists with a little bit more depth than a children’s cartoon. 

Everybody Gets a MacGuffin!

If the central premise of “good guy wants to release bad guy’s secret information” wasn’t good enough, Koepp and Spielberg also threw in, unexplainably, a super MacGuffin. For those who don’t know, a MacGuffin is basically a plot device that exists for no other reason than to drive the plot, usually in a very unnatural, awkward way. And in Disclosure Day, the MacGuffin reveals itself somewhere around the 5-minute mark. When our protagonist, Daniel, gets cornered by the entire Wardex Corporation (led by the very EVIL, very BRITISH Noah Scanlon), we think he’s toast. That is, until he reaches into his pocket and pulls out…the device. And what is the device, you might ask? Well, it’s some sort of alien super technology retrieved by Wardex at some point, which Daniel also stole, and which looks almost exactly the same as a JUUL vaping device. And what does the device do, you might ask? Well, LUCKY for our writers, it can seemingly do and not do almost anything at any given point. Turn on a disconnected power grid? Sure! Make you invisible? Absolutely.. Allow you to project your body into any room on the planet, where you then can spy on and track our protagonists at any point in the movie and therefore eliminate any sense of safety or stakes? Fuck it, why not?!

And since this magic device can seemingly do anything at any given point, you might be saying to yourself, “Oh man, whoever gets their hand on this thing has the upper hand!” Well, no, because for some reason, there are THREE of these fucking things. And BOTH the good guys and the bad guys have one! It’s sort of like when kids play pretend and retcon all of their powers as they go along to never lose. “I shot you!” “No, I had bulletproof armor!” “Well, I used a space laser that can go through bulletproof armor!” “Well, my armor was actually made in space, so lasers reflect off of it, and you’re actually the one who’s dead now”. This is how the entire Goddamn movie went. So, as I said, I didn’t know when to even be scared or excited because I just kept thinking that this stupid ass device would suddenly gain a new power that would change everything–and it usually did.

MacGuffin 2: Electric Boogaloo

Okay, so Koepp and Spielberg thought that “the device” just wasn’t enough to get our characters out of any given situation, so they went ahead and made another one with Emily Blunt’s character, Margaret. When the alien shit starts to go down, she’s suddenly gifted with some strange form of telepathy, which allows her to not only read minds but also present herself to people as anyone she wants (usually a dead family member of theirs or something). Our first introduction to this is when she uses this power to get out of a parking ticket near the beginning of the film. It’s funny, a bit-tongue-in-cheek, and kind of tells us what we need to know about her powers. But then she just does this exact same thing the entire movie. And it becomes…like comically bad. Like at one point, Daniel gets arrested and is locked away in the middle of the highest-security government facilities on the planet, and Margaret walks through without any worries in the world, picks him up, and escorts him away. And how does she do this? Well, she tells the gate guy the secret password. And then she tells the next guy that his mom was proud of him. Then she tells the next guy that he should get over his fear of flying if he wants to see his grandma in Florida before she dies (or something like that; I can’t remember). She literally does this like nine times back-to-back, and the most frustrating thing is: ALL THE BAD GUYS KNOW SHE CAN DO THIS! They are trained to handle this alien magic and guard the facility with their life, and somehow, all of a sudden, they submit to a parlor trick that THEY KNOW ISN’T REAL! I’m sorry for being so angry about this, but what are we doing here? It’s Spielberg and Koepp. They should know this by now. It’s like seeing Tiger Woods putt with his driver. I’m definitely not a better golfer than him, but I know that’s not how you’re supposed to do it.

A Dead Cat vs a Dead Mouse

I’m not necessarily a “cat-and-mouse” hater, but I definitely need to be sold on it. And this movie definitely did not sell me on it. Here’s the entire movie summed up: Daniel gets away, Noah uses a MacGuffin to find him, he gets away again, Noah uses a MacGuffin to find him, he gets away again, he meets up with Margaret, Noah uses a MacGuffin to find them, Margaret uses her MacGuffin to get away, they get to the TV station and are about to play the alien files on TV, Noah cuts the power, then right at the last minute, Daniel’s girlfriend uses a MacGuffin to turn the power on and save the day. Essentially, there was no plot. It was our characters moving from room to room for two hours, with no stakes or interesting developments, until we got to the climax. Like I said earlier, Spielberg’s motto for this movie was “Just get me to the end and leave room for some car chases”. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, Spielberg and Koepp took an awesome premise with lots of potential and squandered it, turning what could have been a masterpiece into Amblin’s equivalent of a straight-to-Netflix action movie starring Ryan Reynolds. And if I had to think about why, my guess would be laziness. They didn’t want to come up with interesting antagonists, so they went with old reliable: guys who dress and talk like bad guys. They couldn’t come up with a legitimate, intriguing plot, so they dragged a cat-and-mouse game out for 60 pages and stuffed in enough car chases and flashing lights to keep the peasants from revolting. They couldn’t figure out how to drive that non-existent plot to the place they wanted to get to, so they gave our protagonist a device that can do anything to help him get there. When they realized giving the protagonist the device that can do anything made the movie boring, they gave one to the antagonist too. When our second antagonist, who never got put in a position to obtain her own device that can do anything, started to encounter conflict, they gave her magical powers that can do anything. All while having nothing even remotely interesting occurring in between. Which goes to show that when writing your script, you still have to remember the basic guidelines of screenwriting. Try to create interesting characters, not boring stereotypes. Especially if they’re supposed to be super important antagonists. Avoid overly convenient plot devices as much as you can (and certainly don’t have three of them). And for the love of God, come up with an actual plot, not just a series of events to fill the time until you get to the climax. All this goes to show that even when you’re the best in the business, writing a good screenplay still takes time and effort, not just a series of motions to get you to the finish line.