Disclosure Day (2026)

Watched 6/14/26 (theater)

SPOILERS BELOW

Oh, how I have counted down the minutes until this movie was released. How I’ve dreamt of the Dolby Surround sound effects, the signature Spielberg lense flares, the excitement surrounding the mystery of the unknown. By far my favorite director; by far my favorite genre—and with a long gap since their last time uniting (it’s been 8 years since Ready Player One if you consider that sci-fi, 21 years since War of the Worlds if you don’t). I definitely plug this one in with the War of the Worlds/Close Encounters/Minority Report canon. Each sci-fi joint made for adult minds—pointed directly at the director’s internal battle of optimism vs cynicism. In Close Encounters it’s his cynicism for the nuclear family fighting his optimism for humanity’s will for discovery. In War of the Worlds it’s once again his cynicism for the nuclear family (notice a theme there?) versus his optimism for human willpower and resilience. In Minority Report it’s his cynicism for government surveillance pitted against his optimism for…I guess Tom Cruise? Because that movie is just pretty fricken cynical.

All three of those films feature these higher beings as a focal point. Kind aliens, fortune-telling enhanced humans, evil aliens. They all bring world-shifting weight to the worlds they inhabit and force large groups of people to make tough decisions. Decisions of pure character. A man leaving his family. A man going after his once-lost family. A man breaking the very system he fought so hard to establish. How regular people deal with these unnaturally powerful forces is something Spielberg continues to hit on even into Disclosure Day.

So if you do the math, Disclosure Day is technically War of the Worlds plus 20 years. Spielberg has had an Obama administration, a Biden administration, and a couple of Trump administrations to decide what he thinks of the common folk in this day and age, and it’s a valid point. He thinks we could use a little empathy. I’m onboard with that—I think it’s cool that he’s so forward about that in interviews even if it’s corny. In an ultra-divided world, empathy can mean a bit more than in a perfect world. I get it. And what if the also modern “disclosure” movement was so tied to this empathy—what if people could feel for these aliens? Learn from them, befriend them, expand their horizons… They’re all extremely worthwile thoughts in my book—fertile ground for setting up cool alien shit and big, thrilling setpieces. If you can tie the aliens and the action back to the big ideas, and make some characters make some hard decisions, that’s a huge, multifaceted win. If you can do that with some potboiler revelations and plot mechanics along the way, awesome.

To rip the bandaid off… I think that this movie has way too much going on with pace and tone to accomplish all of these things in a clean fashion. I think it’s a very messy script with some odd detours and naïveté and a lot of missed opportunities for more thrilling setpieces. This is a chase movie with very little speed! And I will give credit where due—some of the tonal risks worked really well for the vast majority of the movie (i.e. any and all of the humor worked for me, also really enjoyed how we didnt get bogged down in too much lore with some certain alien technology).

Other elements didn’t pay off so well for me. There’s a ton of tension until they finally meet Hugo and that mystery sustained me through fallow periods of action—that was appreciated. And everyone’s acting/character decisions…just great all around with Emily Blunt the clear career-best performance. And then the big third act reveals about her and Josh O’Connor really only revealed things that we already kind of knew…so that was weird and came at the expense of maybe having another action scene?

Anyways, I’m conflicted on this movie, so I should probably start at the beginning. Work through my feelings linearly.

For some reason, Disclosure Day opens with a very abbreviated pro (fake) wrestling match that affords Spielberg thirty seconds or so to put the camera in new places. It’s fun enough.

Josh O’Connor is intro’d as Daniel Kellner. He’squickly ambushed by shadowy operatives working for a company called Wardex, led by Colin Firth’s Noah Scanlon. All we learn is that Daniel is an underdog and Noah is big tech, top shit—and that the underdog stole something from big tech, top shit. Thirty or so agents surround Kellner at Scanlon’s orders, and it seems that things are over for Daniel, until they bring out his kidnapped girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson). Eve is one of multiple audience avatars in this story, and she arrives to ask the questions we can’t, both regular and religious (more on that to come).

This opening scene is exciting. Spielberg shoots it in the same deep shadows that he put to excellent use in West Side Story’s handful of nighttime scenes—and here in Disclosure Day, it really accentuates the mystery we’re plopped into. What the hell did Daniel steal from this company? Screenwriter David Koepp nails the dialogue in tense scenes like this—everyone has palpable threats and clever comebacks. It makes you like Daniel right off the bat.

What’s more, Daniel does a switcharoo where he pulls out some kind of metal bar with a glove on his hand. The fact that he needs to put on the glove heightens the tension and it’s that classic Spielbergian escalation that comes to a head as the guns are forced to drop from Daniel. Kellner holds up the metal bar and Scanlon calls off the guards. Daniel escapes with his backpack and girlfriend, who begins asking her “what the hell” questions. Koepp really excels at this—these tension-cutting arguments after large-scale, gonzo thrills are his specialty (think War of the Worlds or Jurassic Park for more of this work by Koepp).

And then we’re off. No car chase here—Daniel and Jane escape cleanly. We still have no idea what the powerful metal bar is or what’s in Daniel’s backpack, and he’s not telling Jane much. But they escape to a nunnery where the movie took its first left turn for me.

Koepp and Spielberg reveal that Jane used to be a nun, and this is all set up for a very bland, very forced set of conversations with her former mentor regarding faith. It all questions the existence of extraterrestrials, and it’s all quite one-note. The old nun straight-up tells Jane multiple times that she thinks God created more than just humans. No tension to it, never once do we worry that Jane is losing her faith, or that the church will be against alien contact, etc. It’s just a waste of five to ten minutes throught the film and is one of a few really naïve writing choices in this movie. Just completely unnecessary.

While Daniel and Jane are hiding out, we’re introduced to Margaret Fairchild, played by Emily Blunt, and her boyfriend, played by Wyatt Russell. Right off the bat, I think I have to admit that this Blunt performance somehow topped Sicario for me. She’s asked to do and say so many ridiculous things—sometimes for laughs, sometimes deathly serious and emotional. From physical comedy to agonizing panic attacks to convincingly reading the news, it’s her most complex and most convincing performance yet. She single-handedly electrified the movie for me, and with anyone else in this role, I think this movie takes a much larger dip in my 1-10 score.

Margaret and her boyfriend (damn, Wyatt Russell sure is underused, here) meet a small cardinal in their apartment—it flies in through the window. And just like that, Emily Blunt’s Margaret is imbued with magical powers. She can feel things about people, read their minds to a degree, and speak any language—even alien… Which is exactly what happens when she reads the news that morning.

Everyone understandably flips out when Margaret speaks alien, including Wardex, who show up at the hospital ready to take her away. This is simultaneously when the movie really kicks into gear and also begins making many of what I thought to be its cardinal sins. We hop back and forth for the next hour+ between Margaret and Daniel’s stories. Both are being hunted by Wardex, and the suspense is really gripping. You don’t know what’s coming, O’Connor slowly reveals more alien stuff, and each character is forced to make tough decisions. It’s good storytelling.

It also goes on for a very long time. Just people driving and running and ducking away from bad guys at very convenient times. It’s oddly static for Spielberg, with the only opportunities for signature camera moves coming from the spin-trick during car rides. I will say there’s a cool—very derivative, but cool—idea presented regarding those metal bars Daniel pulled out and threatened to use earlier. We come to find out that Wardex’s Scanlon (Colin Firth, who I forgot to mention is really subtle in a good way in a part that seriously could have looked dumb if he had over-dialed it) can take control of people after fighting with their mind by the power of these metal bars. It hurts him and takes a great deal of effort, but he first uses it on Jane to try and kill Daniel. And it has this great eye-dea of making the eye colors of people change to reveal the mind control. That was a fun enough plot mechanic on the Daniel/Jane side of things to tide me over until we got to the action.

Emily Blunt meanwhile just continues to discover her powers, in ways both profound and laugh-out-loud funny. It’s some solid screwball comedy at the center of a sci-fi thriller, a fun wrinkle I wasn’t expecting. It all worked for me and got a solid amount of screentime to develop—I just wish it wasn’t at the expense of action.

(Side-note: there’s also a weird revelation later in the movie that everyone can see Emily Blunt as a loved one of theirs’, and it causes a really convenient escape that just makes the cyclical chase go a bit stale.)

I mean here it is…my chief complaint… There is like 10 minutes worth of action TOPS in this movie. I want to analyze the main scenes because what we get is so worth discussing…but it also feels like an afterthought to the finale, which I will touch on as well.

So the problem is that 120 or so minutes of this 140 minute “thriller” are without action. They may have some tension, but it is only elevated into Spielbergian chaos twice.

Action Scene One: The Car Chase

At one point, Jane is stuck at a safe house and Daniel must save her. Little does he know she’s being mind-controlled and is ready to kill him with a hidden kitchen knife. The dramatic irony trap is set, she hides the knife. Daniel has no idea.

O’Connor’s Daniel takes a minute to catch his nervous breath (this always, always, always works to get me excited for an action scene—make characters nervous and you’ll have a 10X more effective setup to the actual choreography). Then he army crawls into a police cruiser acting as part of a perimeter of law enforcement and Wardex.

Not only is Daniel forced to turn the car on and gun it in tight quarters with a bunch of pistols pointing at him, but he crashes into a tree immediately and is nearly capped right there. Note to directors: this also always works where someone accelerates while running into something they hit. Spielberg, maybe more than any other director, understands the importance of clumsy movements in action scenes. Josh O’Connor approaches the cars with all the grace of a child playing hide and seek. He starts the car with all the nervousness of a tech guy thrown into an action movie. When he throws it in drive, he seems to be almost apologizing for stealing the car with the awkward look on his face and the obvious fact that he did nit make a plan. He knows he needs to end up picking up his girlfriend to get out of there, but the clumsiness comes in the fact that he clearly planned no route in particular to get there. It’s just way more blood-pumping than a confident, muscle-bound action hero. Spielberg has always gotten that.

Daniel (O’Connor) finally arrives at the safe house after perfectly-tuned gunshots aplenty rattle off his stolen vehicle. From the inside of the house, we watch as the car slams through the sun room, Spielberg knowing that this camera placement will make for maximum impact. It’s the little things like that that make his suspense feel so darn real. When O’Connor finally gets Jane in the car, it’s just in the nick of time of Wardex agents pounding on just-locked windows. We cut to the outside of the safe house just in time to see the car rip through the front of the sun room and into a convoy of other cars trying to take him down. This is the money shot, and it rocks, but the biggest bummer here was the John Williams score. It IS here during the chase, and it’s good, but nowhere near as well-edited as other movies. And then shortly thereafter, the chase ends. The music never really gets to kick into gear, it only takes one bumper-car movement on a bridge for Daniel and Jane to lose the Wardex agents. It’s a little anticlimactic. Luckily, this scene gets a boost from some seriously appreciated backseat tension as Jane fights herself to not stab Daniel, and that’s great layering by Koepp, but without sustained car mechanics or Williams score, it never gels the way I wanted it to. Something like Minority Report or Raiders have some of the longest-sustained, most idiosynchratic car chases in film history. I wanted this to get into that pantheon just because I know Spielberg can still do it…but it never got close.

I watched Spielberg just a few years ago do some of the best, sustained choreography of his career with West Side Story. Some of the chains of movement in that movie stack up against anything in Indiana Jones or War of the Worlds, so you can’t tell me he’s lost it in his old age. Another case in point: Disclosure Day’s one other action beat: The Train Tracks.

This train track sequence was the big trailer moment for me. I waited and waited all movie for it to show up. And it pretty much lived up to the hype. This is why I go to the movies: to see things I have never seen before (something this movie often struggles with).

At this point in Disclosure Day, Margaret and Daniel are travelling together in a small sedan, unaware that a Wardex agent is hot on their trail as they come to a stop before the train tracks. They’re talking, and we see the train passing by at full speed, no music at all to speak of (here this is a good choice). They’re still talking, now shot from the front, we see the car accelerating behind them—but they have no idea! All of a sudden, the Wardex agent slams into the back of the heroes’ vehicle and begins slowly pushing them toward the moving train cars. Daniel and Margaret begin panicking, suggesting a plan to dive out of the car but thinking twice when they realize the only thing keeping them off the travks is Margaret’s foot on the breaks. Daniel is not gonna leave his driver. They brace for the worst… And then the Wardex agent backs up to move in for the kill. The heroes try to seize the opportunity and bail from the car in the climax of white-knuckle moments here. Boom! The doors shut as the Wardex SUV slams the sedan’s doors shut on impact. The hood of the sedan is pushed between the train and the tracks, sucked under, and taken on a ride from hell.

The car is literally caught under the train being pulled with it across parallel tracks. Daniel and Margaret work fast, inexpertly kicking out the windshield to escape up a ladder on the side of the train. As they battle the wind roaring at them and the inherent unbalance of trying to climb out of a car caught under a moving train, we hear the roar of gunshots from the tailing Wardex agent and the impending doom of an incoming train on the parallel tracks. If they don’t hurry in their escape, they’ll be destroyed. And of course Emily Blunt’s character trips on her way out! Spielberg, Koepp, and their editor layer so many competing points of tension here that it almost made me forget my issues surrounding it.

For all of these flourishes of Spielberg at his best in a scene like this, there are only two action scenes. That is not nearly enough for what this movie’s runtime is. Far too much of it is repetitive, uninteresting expositionary conversations or very surface-level moral debates. The best of the dialogue is the humor or anything with Emily Blunt. You really could have sandwiched at least three more action beats in there. And I have no idea why a good 20-minuter couldn’t have been snuck in there ala Minority Report. There could have been so many opportunities to do an extended action sequence with aliens or alien tech. They tease one later, but it only lasts for a couple of minutes (invisible truck) and really ends before it gets into gear, unfortunately. I don’t count that.

The climax of this movie is what I most take issue with. For as much as I was taken with the mystery of the first 1hr45 or the fun of hanging out with Emily Blunt’s Margaret and her strange character arc, I was expecting some kind of big payoff when she and Daniel meet, after making it such a mystery box all movie till then.

When they finally do meet and get where they’re going, then, all we do being revealing that they had alien contact when they were kids a.) was obvious. How else would they have gotten the powers?

b.) teaches us nothing. We had already seen aliens in the videos on Danny’s computer. Here we just see less of the aliens and have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. Maybe planting these powers in the kids but in the least threatening way possible. There is nothing interesting about this scene. Josh O’Connor is freaking out but I really don’t get why…the aliens are nice, it turns out.

So they reveal how Margaret and Daniel got involved in all this… They reveal something we basically all knew. And this is supposed to qualify as the beginning of a BIG third act. And we’re all going back to KCXE news station, where we first met Blunt’s Margaret. Something should come full circle, yes? But also surprise us…? That was not the case for my viewing.

And this is the point where I am sorry to say I think Koepp and Spielberg just really get in their own way and can’t bend their old-school idea to work in a new-school age. The final act entails Blunt and O’Connor’s characters releasing alien footage to the entire world all at once. Furthermore, their friend Hugo reveals a real live alien on camera, brought to the studio in person to be conversed with.

It kills me to say this just doesn’t work in the age of AI and digital effects. Very few people watching this news report would believe these videos, nor would they buy the alien being inteoduced on camera. It’s too preposterous to be believed in a series of minutes. The silliness of their thinking is further bolstered by a news anchor character who’s getting waaaaay too emotional over something she should really doubt is real and then a final line of “Listen” that is just way too preachy.

The thing I expected least about this movie is the allegorical aspect of it. It has those religious debate scenes that I mentioned earlier, the most half-assed attempts at deeper meaning you could possibly write. And then here at the end, the news anchor displays this ridiculous anount of wmpathy for something that could very well be fake (it’s hard not to read her as an idiot) and the alien footage shown all being revealed to the public as torture/interrogation. It’s clearly an allegory for real-world events with human beings from countries other than our own, and it all just comes off as a bit overdramatic and hokey. Unsubtle. And really, sadly, this golden rule/humanity/communication/get our heads out of our asses bit was already done way better a few years ago in Villeneuve’s Arrival. This was too similar for me.

But the real tough part is, I like that Spielberg is trying this. Close Encounters is about broken family. Aliens break the family. E.T. is about broken family. Aliens help the family. Disclosure Day is about a broken world. Aliens try to help. It brings together Spielberg’s cynicism for the current government regime with his optimism for people to rise above the government and media and open their eyes.

It’s the logical next step for someone like Spielberg who clearly has his key interests. And they are noble ones—I agree with what he’s posing. Listen to people! Ignore social media. Yes! I just think there was a much more subtle way to do this in a more genre-fied ending and less in the way of this hammy “special report.”

It just comes across as somewhat puerile wish fulfillment on a platform like the news that is so volatile these days that it’s just hard to believe this strategy would work on people.

And that’s Disclosure Day. It ends on this somewhat strange note of Spielberg and his alien telling us to listen to one another. Literally. It’s big and obvious and not nearly as visceral as I had hoped the third act of this movie would be.

If there is one kind of “intangible” that I shoild mention, it’s that the aliens never really get the chance to present that “wow” factor. In E.T., it’s the bike scene. In WotW, it’s the walker’s emergence from the ground. In Close Encounters, it’s clearly the end—and also things as subtly chilling as the India sequence with the chanting which pays off like a damn slot machine at the end. Each of those have their fuckin awesome moments and this one just…doesn’t get there. The minute to minute is never bad, always fairly engaging. But never chills.

Now, I have often with favorite directors of mine misunderstood a movie my first time around and had it turn into a personal favorite with rewatches. I hope that happens here… Blunt should win every award—she’s completely captivating. O’Connor is pretty one-dimensional as Daniel but sells it big-time. Firth does exactly what’s necessary in the very surface-level villain role. John Williams stays fairly quiet. The action scenes are decent but spare—and far from Spielberg’s best or most complex. The plot spins its wheels for a long time to generate so much myserious goodwill and just can’t pay it all off for me at the end. Equal parts obvious and silly and jumbled, there was just too much going on in this one for me. Still, there’s enough signature Spielberg moves to warrant a decent score from me and I’m excited for a rewatch… But bring on that Western he’s making—hopefully with some solid shootouts.

7/10