Steven Spielberg’s newest sci-fi movie is Disclosure Day, an action-packed story about a guy (Josh O’Connor) who steals information detailing a decades-long international conspiracy to cover up proof of extraterrestrial visits to Earth. When the story begins, he’s on the run from a shadowy organization bent on stopping him from disclosing the information to the public. He’s soon joined by a meteorologist (Emily Blunt) who is suddenly exhibiting fantastical empathic powers, and it turns out they share a connection that could change the world forever.
Disclosure Day is excellent, with a vibe akin to Spielberg’s classic movies like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That said, there’s nothing in this movie that I haven’t already seen in various episodes of my favorite sci-fi show.
The X-Files began in 1993 on the still-young Fox network and quickly became a phenomenon. The show focuses on a pair of FBI agents investigating paranormal activity. Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) was a die-hard believer in all sorts of supernatural phenomena, both Earthly and otherworldly. Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), meanwhile, was a skeptic originally positioned to debunk Mulder’s investigation of The X-Files, but she eventually comes to believe in his pursuit of the truth.
Throughout its 11-season run, The X-Files was generally divided into two kinds of episodes. There was the standalone “Monster of the Week” story, which focused on a single, isolated case. Then there were the “mythology” episodes, which pertained to Mulder’s desire to expose a decades-old government conspiracy pertaining to the existence of extraterrestrial life and its activities on Earth. It’s in these mythology episodes that you can find parallels to Disclosure Day, including its characters, story and overall message.
Let’s start with Agent Mulder, who bears a fairly significant resemblance to Disclosure Day’s Daniel Kellner (O’Connor). While one is an FBI agent and the other is a cybersecurity expert, both embody the overall message of exposing the truth to the public, specifically on the subject of alien life on Earth. Both are unwavering in their commitment to this cause, though Mulder’s motivations go a bit deeper. Whereas Kellner was radicalized when he found out the truth about the conspiracy, Mulder has been motivated since he was a child, when his younger sister was abducted by aliens. Since then, he’s wanted answers about her disappearance and the conspiracy that brought it about.
There are also parallels with a number of other characters in the film, if not quite as direct as Mulder and Kellner. In Disclosure Day, Blunt plays Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist. While her somewhat flaky personality early in the film is nothing like the more serious Agent Scully, both end up playing a rather significant role in the alien conspiracy. While I won’t spoil Fairchild’s role beyond the alien language stuff seen in the trailer for Disclosure Day, Scully gets abducted during season 2 of The X-Files and what is done to her becomes a recurring storyline in the show.
Colin Firth plays the mysterious bad guy at the center of the conspiracy in Disclosure Day. He’s a good villain in that classic, sneering Spielbergian kind of way, but he doesn’t hold a lighter to the shadowy, mysterious Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis) in The X-Files. Even Colman Domingo’s character, a defector from the conspiracy and now an advocate for disclosure, bears some similarities to the character Deep Throat (Jerry Hardin) from the show’s early seasons.
But the similarities between The X-Files go even further, and exact plot points from the movie can also be found in the TV show. There are many episodes where Mulder and Scully are on the run from all sorts of conspiracy-connected bad guys and they hide out in safe houses and the like. Disclosure Day movie has a rather killer train sequence, but it doesn’t come close to season 3, episode 10 (“731”) of The X-Files, where Mulder boards a moving train transporting an alien-human hybrid. The train even ends up exploding in the end, whereas Disclosure Day only features a car getting trashed.
Even some of the freaky stuff going on with animals in Disclosure Day pales in comparison to the bizarre animal activities in The X-Files. In season 5, episode 19, “Folie à Deux,” the agents tangle with a human-sized praying mantis-like creature who turns people into zombies. In season 2 episode 2 (“The Host”), the villain turned out to be a humanoid flatworm. There was even a Loch Ness Monster-type creature living in a Georgia lake in season 3 episode 22. All Disclosure Day has is spooky deer.
Don’t get me wrong, I really did like Disclosure Day. It’s a great sci-fi thriller worth the price of admission and a return to form for Spielberg. However, the truth is that there’s nothing in it that won’t seem at least a little bit familiar to X-Files fans. And just like Mulder and Kellner, all I want to do is expose the truth.
Disclosure Day releases in theaters on June 12.
