Disclosure Day may be a more important movie than a successful one.
This isn’t to say that Steven Spielberg’s latest dive into what ET enthusiasts refer to as “the phenomenon” is not, by and large, a successful work of both art and entertainment. It means that its cultural impact, which should be galvanizing and could be volcanic, far outweighs the typical barometers of triumphs and misfires with which we judge movies. Disclosure Day is hulking and ambitious enough to contain many of both, but it’s the feeling of emerging from the cinema dazed, maybe a little confused, and quite possibly changed that will be the lasting impact of this rare specimen, a vital popcorn picture. At the risk of sounding too optimistically Spielbergian, it’s a road map for a kinder, more open and more compassionate future.
While Disclosure Day can be approached as pure escapism — a speculative sci-fi adventure for a paranoid age — doing so would be a disservice to the film and to Spielberg’s career-spanning interest in the subject of aliens. For hobbyists who have long delved into the evidence of extraterrestrial life (and I consider myself among them) as well as those drawn into the subject more recently by media and government disclosures of UAP craft, Disclosure Day had to serve not as an exploitation of the phenomenon but as a verification of our beliefs — a heavy responsibility for the director who invented the blockbuster.
But given Spielberg’s past approaches to the alien question, his sincerity, curiosity and, yes, sentimentality should never have been in doubt. His War of the Worlds remake serving as the exception proving the rule, Spielberg’s worldview, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to E.T. to A.I. Artificial Intelligence, has presented off-world life as peaceful, not destructive. Anyone expecting to see malicious Martians evaporating U.S. cities throughout the course of Disclosure Day will be mighty disappointed.
In fact, even those hoping for a movie populated by advanced beings or spectacular craft — to my knowledge, the terms UFO/UAP are never mentioned in David Koepp’s screenplay — will leave the cinema with only scant presentation. Yet it’s a film steeped in lore, with Easter eggs aplenty for those educated on the subject. Without spoiling too much, a possibly apocryphal but tantalizing tale of a certain president touring a certain comedian to a certain Florida Air Force base appears in footage that looks surpassingly authentic.
But this is a film about us, not them. It’s about the layers of compartmentalized obfuscation maintained within the U.S. government and the defense contractors with whom it shares its most top-secret information. Josh O’Connor plays Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity expert for a government contractor called Wardex (its final letter a subliminal nod to a tech trillionaire who shall not be named?), who absconds with USB drives containing his organization’s entire trove of ET evidence, dating back to the Roswell crash of 1947.
Daniel’s motivations as a whistleblower are noble: The public, “all 8.5 billion of us,” deserve to know that we’re not alone in the universe, and that our country has been back-engineering exotic craft and cruelly experimenting on the “biologics” piloting them (a term used by recent real-life whistleblower David Grusch in congressional testimony). Daniel is among 12 Wardex defectors, including Colman Domingo’s Hugo Wakefield, who controls their operation from a warehouse. A mysterious set, like something out of a sitcom soundstage, is being built around him while he communicates with Daniel on secure burner phones, elevating a mystery that won’t come to a head until the film’s final third.
While Spielberg usually excels in opening acts, the Snowden-esque gambit of Daniel’s escape with the precious loot is the movie’s weakest tea. In it, we’re introduced to the film’s chief nemesis, Wardex head Noah Scanlon, played by Colin Firth with all of the subtlety of a megalomaniacal Marvel villain. They scramble over a MacGuffin-like handheld device that, we’ll learn, grants the holder supernatural powers.
But given the object’s chilling implications to come, the action is initiated in routine cloak-and-dagger story mechanics. O’Connor, too, is not at his best here, his reticence as unwitting hero coming across as affectless and lacking the presence to carry the film. (This is coming from a critic who found his work in 2025’s The Mastermind to be the year’s best performance.)
Daniel’s girlfriend Jane, while admirably portrayed by Eve Hewson, could have also used more depth and definition. A former novitiate who grew disillusioned with a life of faith, she’s more prop than person, existing largely as a mouthpiece for capital-D disclosure’s implications on global religions.
It takes the appearance of the deservedly ballyhooed Emily Blunt, who is already earning Oscar buzz, to lift Disclosure Day into a more vaunted place in its storytelling and characterization. In a parallel narrative, she plays Margaret Fairchild, a bubbly meteorologist for a Kansas City news station whose dreams of something bigger — a promotion to the anchor’s desk, the move to a larger television market — have begun to clash with the more modest ambitions of her musician boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), who is just finding his footing in the K.C. scene.
These are just the sort of real-world, three-dimensional people, their complications presented in smart and concise exposition from Koepp, that had been lacking in the film’s other plot. And Margaret’s arc only grows more compelling when a cardinal flies through their apartment window, lands on their kitchen table, gazes at Margaret for a few beats, and leaves — granting Margaret the sudden ability to speak fluent Russian and so much more to come.
It is the destiny of Margaret, gifted with a sudden download of psychic abilities beyond all comprehension, and Daniel, whose aptitude for mathematics likewise expands beyond human knowledge, to meet up, but why? And what does that box cutter-shaped device from the first act really do? And why is a crop circle forming around Daniel while he’s standing in a field of wheat? And what’s with all these bizarre animal contacts?
The answers are all glorious manna for the ET heads in the audience, which, contrary to Spielberg’s reputation as the most populist of filmmakers, are the primary audience to appreciate all the nuances of Disclosure Day. Remote viewing, screen memories, channeling, abductions: These are all terms of art in the ET/conscious living subculture, and their validation in a $115 million adventure saga feels every bit like a humble acknowledgment of respect for the phenomenon and the real people living it. And if we have to sit through a genuinely unbelievable chase scene or two, the payoff is more than worth it.
Disclosure Day is not a political movie, but it has its ear to the zeitgeist. TV news dispatches suggest a world on the brink of another global war, with Russia and North Korea rattling more than sabers, and scenes of chaos and gas shortages in American cities. Attempting to dissuade Daniel from absconding with the UFO files, Scanlon suggests that his data dump will be received as “just another distraction” from larger issues, an argument often leveled at our current administration’s piecemeal releases.
Which is what makes Spielberg’s finale so riveting. I won’t spoil the ending, but suffice it to say it’s one of the director’s signature accomplishments over a more than 50-year career, as well as one of the most deftly edited montages in recent cinema history.
In an address to the U.N. General Assembly in 1987, President Reagan said, “In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” Replace the word “threat” with “contact,” and this is Disclosure Day in a nutshell. For all its imperfections, this is a film that aspires to heal a fractured nation. It’s the movie we all need to see.
DISCLOSURE DAY. Director: Steven Spielberg; Cast: Josh O’Connor, Emily Blunt, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, Wyatt Russell; Distributor: Universal Pictures; Rating: PG-13; Now playing at most area theaters