“Everyone knows not to stare into the sun. It’s something your mother tells you when you’re a kid. ‘Don’t look at the sun or you’ll go blind.’ But sometimes you want to understand something so badly that you’ll risk going blind for just a glimpse of what it all might be about.” — Allie Keys, Taken (2002).
In 2002, Steven Spielberg produced a ten-part miniseries for the Sci-Fi Channel called Taken. It won an Emmy, made a star of an eight-year-old Dakota Fanning, and then quietly faded from cultural memory. Watching Disclosure Day, his new alien thriller, one suspects he never quite let it go.
Taken told the story of an alien-human hybrid child born from decades of extraterrestrial experimentation on unsuspecting American families, a government cover-up traced back to Roswell 1947, and a finale in which the chosen protagonist uses her alien-gifted powers to outwit the institutional forces hunting her down. Twenty-four years later, Spielberg has returned to hauntingly familiar territory. Disclosure Day is not a remake of Taken. It is its own film, with its own urgency and its own ideas. But the DNA is unmistakable, and watching one after the other is like hearing the same melody played in a different key.
Mild Spoilers Ahead
Disclosure Day follows Margaret Fairchild, played by Emily Blunt, a Kansas City news anchor who begins involuntarily speaking in foreign languages and sensing the innermost emotions of strangers, abilities she neither asked for nor understands. Josh O’Connor’s Daniel Kellner is a cybersecurity expert who has stolen classified evidence of a decades-long government cover-up of alien contact. The two are drawn together by a bond they cannot explain, pursued by the villainous Wardex Corporation and its operative Noah Scanlon, played by Colin Firth, whose true agenda stays just opaque enough to sustain the film’s first act, and then collapses under the weight of an underwhelming resolution.
The Taken Parallels
Viewers who remember Taken will feel a very specific kind of double vision throughout. In that miniseries, Allie Keys was a hybrid child purpose-built to be the bridge between species, handpicked, modified without consent, and activated as an adult by forces beyond her control. Margaret and Daniel follow the same template almost exactly. The extra-terrestrial artefact is another thread the two stories share.
In Taken, a recovered Roswell object passes between generations of the Crawford family, each possessing it without fully understanding it. In Disclosure Day, an alien device stolen from Wardex becomes the engine of the film’s final act, coveted by institutions, dangerous in the wrong hands, and only meaningful when wielded by those the aliens themselves have chosen.
That government cover-up, in both stories, traces its roots to Roswell 1947. The institutional villain in Disclosure Day has been privatised: Wardex is a corporation rather than a general. But the architecture of the conspiracy is identical.
Both stories are also animated by the same philosophical conviction, that what the aliens value most in humans is not intelligence or technology, but empathy and love In Taken, the emotional core of humanity is precisely what the aliens, beings of pure energy and cold purpose, have come to study and ultimately to need. Disclosure Day makes the same argument, only louder.
Most strikingly of all, both climaxes turn on the same narrative mechanism. The protagonist blessed with alien-granted power uses it to fool and outrun the forces of institutional secrecy at the crucial moment. In Taken, Allie’s psychic gifts engineer the escape. In Disclosure Day, Margaret’s abilities serve the same function at the film’s most critical juncture. The mechanism differs. The shape is identical.
And then there is the ending that does not quite end. Both stories build sprawling tension toward a climax but while Taken leaves one fulfilled, Disclosure Day leaves the audience wanting more. Spielberg, in both cases, seems more interested in the weight of the question than in the tidiness of the answer.
None of this is to say Disclosure Day is without merit. There is much to admire too. Janusz Kaminski’s camera is almost always in motion, usually spinning around its characters, breaking expected axes of action and keeping viewers unsteady. A car-meets-train set piece midway through the film is the kind of bravura engineering that reminds you, physically, why Spielberg remains the craftsman’s craftsman. Blunt is extraordinary. She carries the film’s most difficult scenes, including a shattering moment in which she loses control of her language on live television, with total conviction.
Then there is John Williams, making his 30th collaboration with Spielberg at the age of 94. The score is the film’s greatest technical achievement and its most curious liability in equal measure. It is sweeping, operatic, and haunting, elevating every scene in which it features. But the familiarity of the vocabulary is inescapable. The music keeps pulling you to a galaxy far, far away. The French horns, the soaring strings, the sense of cosmic scale that Williams has been perfecting since 1977.
There are moments when you are watching Emily Blunt navigate a conspiracy thriller and your mind has drifted to the Death Star. That is the paradox of Williams: the grandeur is beyond argument, but the idiom is so deeply embedded in cinema memory that it can break the spell of the very film it is scoring.
Disclosure Day, rather than feeling like Spielberg’s definitive modern statement on extraterrestrial life, seems like a film thirty years late. The first act builds genuine intrigue. The second sustains it. But when the answers come, they are proportionally thin against the architecture of mystery the film has constructed.
Allie Keys had something to say about that too. “Some people spend their lives hoping for something to happen that will change everything.” Disclosure Day promises exactly that but at the moment of truth, it says only one word and goes quiet.
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