******UNIDENTIFIED FLYING SPOILERS!******
I’ve been a fan of director Steven Spielberg since my family and I waited hours parked outside a drive-in theater waiting for the filled parking lot to clear so we could squeeze in and see “JAWS” back in 1975. Two years later, seeing “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (CE3K) at the Egyptian in Hollywood at age eleven left “the five tones” playing in my ears long afterward. Along the way, the objectively brilliant filmmaker has sometimes stumbled (still remember the sting of “1941”), but even his less-than-successful movies have been fascinating examples of pure cinematic craft.
“Disclosure Day” continues the director’s lifelong obsession with UFOs that began with “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
The trademarks of a Spielberg movie usually include unapologetic sentimentality, rich musical scores, low-angles, bright lights outside the frame, and zooming closeups of fear and awe. He also extracts career-best performances from child actors (Drew Barrymore, Dakota Fanning, Henry Thomas), and even a few adults (Robert Shaw). Recurring semi-biographical themes of his often include divorced families, different social strata pooling together for common cause, a pervasive optimism, and an obsession with extraterrestrial life. That last one began when a young Spielberg was awakened by his father late one night to join a few dozen spectators in the middle of an open field to witness a spectacular meteor shower. He’s “watched the skies” to this day.
Emily Blunt (“A Quiet Place”) plays a weather forecaster whose unique past is part of a long, conspiratorial puzzle.
Spielberg’s latest film, “Disclosure Day,” squares his cycle of UFO/alien-themed movies that began in 1977 and continued with the child-friendly, über-successful “E.T.” (1982) before taking a darker turn in 2005 with his underrated adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.” “Disclosure Day” was written by Spielberg and David Koepp (“Jurassic Park”), and photographed by Spielberg’s longtime cinematographer Janusz Kamiński (“Schindler’s List,” “War of the Worlds”), with another musical score by the legendary, just-shy-of-retired John Williams (“JAWS,” “Star Wars,” “Superman: The Movie”).
All the credentials for a great blockbuster movie are there… but they don’t quite add up.
“Disclosure Day” (2026)
David Keller (Josh O’Connor) escapes from Wardex operatives with his girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson) and a bag of closely-guarded secrets, by threatening them with a vital piece of stolen alien technology. The chase begins…
Note: I appreciated that the movie began without the usual setup and exposition. As he did with CE3K, co-writer/director Spielberg throws us into the deep end of the movie’s initially chaotic conspiracy pool–forcing us to sink or swim. British actor Josh O’Connor recently starred as a struggling young priest in writer/director Rian Johnson’s (“Star Wars: The Last Jedi”) latest Benoit Blanc movie, “Wake Up Dead Man” (2025).
The mass surveillance center of the Wardex corporation; an agency that’s been reverse-engineering stolen alien technology since the crash-landing at Roswell in 1947. Wardex will do anything to keep knowledge of aliens a deep–and profitable–secret.
Note: Once again riffing on CE3K and “E.T,” Spielberg imagines a vast, well-organized conspiracy actively working to keep knowledge of extraterrestrials a closely-guarded (and potentially lucrative) secret. In his older films, Spielberg characterized his conspiracies as government-based; now, he places it in the private sector with a fictional mega-company called Wardex, which is reverse-engineering alien technology for its own profit and benefit. These advances are being slowly trickled out to the public… at Wardex’s discretion, of course.
St. Louis-based weather person Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) and her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) receive and odd visitation from a red cardinal–which has come on behalf of unseen aliens to activate Margaret’s untapped empathic powers. After her activation, Margaret suddenly experiences a moment of fluent Russian.
Note: The idea of aliens possessing (i.e. “imbuing”) living creatures with their own will is a bit disturbing, and shows lack of respect for the possessed creature’s own agency. It soon becomes clear the bird was meant to ‘activate’ unwitting alien sleeper agent Margaret, which brings me to Margaret’s own hijacked will (more on that one later). Speaking of aliens, British-born Emily Blunt also stars in two of the “A Quiet Place” movies, which are written and directed by her actor/director husband, John Krasinski. Blunt’s onscreen significant other ‘Jackson’ is played by Wyatt Russell; the actor son of Kurt Russell (“The Thing,” “Escape From New York”) and Goldie Hawn (Hawn also starred in director Spielberg’s first feature film, 1974’s “Sugarland Express”).
While delivering her scheduled weather report, Margaret begins involuntarily speaking in a series of alien clicks, ticks and tocks. The video quickly goes viral online, and Margaret soon comes onto Wardex’s radar.
Note: After using her newfound empathic powers (more like telepathic) to manipulate her way out of a speeding ticket, Margaret arrives late for her weather report. On camera, she begins ‘speaking’ in a series of clicking mathematical noises that only David can hear clearly in English, thanks to his own recently activated alien ‘gifts.’ This beginning has the vibe of a very expensive episode of “The X-Files.”
After spending the night with his ex-nun girlfriend at a friendly abbey, David and Jane are forced by Wardex to take temporary refuge in an abandoned rural home. David slips away, just as Wardex closes in on his position.
Note: There’s a scene where David conveniently slips past the Wardex agents surrounding the abandoned house a bit too easily–and in broad daylight–by simply crouching down a bit and hoping none of the guards turn their heads in his general direction. At first I wondered if he was using the alien device in his possession to ‘Jedi mind-trick’ his way past the guards, until I realized it was just clumsy, awkward staging (one of their rare times you can say that about a Spielberg movie).
In the heart of Wardex, its CEO Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) uses alien tech to track down Jane and David’s location.
Note: The scene of Noah using his alien psychic mind-tracking device reminded me of Professor Xavier of “The X-Men” using Cerebro. And why do we always assume aliens must wield godlike powers like telepathy, mind-control or what-have-you? Once again, this harkens back to “The X-Files” aliens, who were more godlike than beings who simply evolved on a different planet. British actor Colin Firth (“The King’s Speech”) makes his science fiction debut with this film, though he’s already starred in the sci-fi adjacent “Kingsman: The Secret Service” (2014), which featured gadgetry that bordered on sci-fi.
With David outside, a helpless Jane’s pupils swap colors with those of Noah, as he telepathically manipulates her via alien tech.
Noah tries forcing Jane to kill David, but the strong-willed young woman inflicts self-harm to thwart Wardex’s plans.
Note: I also couldn’t shake the feeling that Noah’s bright blue ’empathic pupils’ he gained after linking with Jane looked like the bright blue “spice eyes” seen in the various “Dune” movies (and TV-miniseries). We see that a character must have one of the all-purpose deus ex machina alien devices in their hand when initiating a telepathic link. Earlier we were told it was a potential explosive device, and in a throwaway gag we see it used for brief teleportation. The device quickly becomes an alien Swiss Army knife (or Harry Potter-style wand), and conveniently gets our characters out of a few too many sticky situations. Irish actress Eve Hewson, who plays Jane, also costarred in the now ironically-titled 2021 Netflix series “Behind Her Eyes.”
Meanwhile, Margaret’s activation somehow subconsciously clues her into the aliens’ plan, as she leaves Jackson behind to find and help the endangered David, as determined Wardex agent forces Margaret’s car into a collision with an oncoming train. She and David then climb aboard a moving train car in order to escape.
Note: When Margaret and David meet, it reminded me of Roy (Richard Dreyfus) and Jillian (Melinda Dillon) reuniting for their escape to Devil’s Tower in Spielberg’s CE3K or even Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) and Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) thrown together into another cryptic conspiracy in “North by Northwest” (1959), which was one of Spielberg’s many inspirations for CE3K. The scene of Margaret’s car being rammed into a train by a pursuing Wardex agent is a direct callback to Spielberg’s aforementioned “Duel,” when Dennis Weaver’s Plymouth Valiant is pushed toward an oncoming train at a railway crossing. Borrowed or not, the train scene is a genuine nail-biter.
David and Margaret receive calls of encouragement from a mysterious man named Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who is overseeing construction of a full-scale recreation of Margaret’s childhood home inside of a warehouse. It’s hoped the recreated house will trigger latent memories from Margaret’s childhood to help them grasp the aliens’ plan.
Note: Actor Colman Domingo, who plays the kindly, house-building Hugo, recently costarred in “Michael,” the 2026 heavily-sanitized biopic of Michael Jackson, where he played the late pop megastar’s abusive father, Joe Jackson (not to be confused with the shoeless baseball player…).
Clasping both of their hands on the device, the Margaret/David dyad are able to recall a shared childhood memory…
Note: While the recreation of Margaret’s childhood house makes some kind of in-movie sense, I question the necessity of building the entire house just to jog her memory, when Hugo and his contractors could’ve simply built an exacting replica of her childhood bedroom. Once inside the bedroom, it might’ve been enough to loosen those repressed memories, using her bond with David through the alien gizmo. In press junkets I’ve seen for this movie, Spielberg commented on how the scene of Margaret seeing her recreated childhood home was inspired by the writer/director seeing his own meticulously-recreated childhood home for the thinly-veiled autobiographical film, “Meet the Fabelmans” (2022).
Young Margaret (Delaney Cuthbert) is guided by alien-guided animals in the Missouri wilderness towards a mysterious glowing ‘house’ out of a storybook–in reality, a disguised alien spaceship.
Note: The aliens using animals to lure young Margaret into the snowy backwoods near her home into an eerie, storybook-inspired mirage is deeply disturbing to me. While I realize the aliens in this movie are supposed to be benign, I find their psychic tricking of and tampering with non-consenting children deeply not okay.
Young David (Tyler Renaud) is terrified by the aliens, while young Margaret encourages him to take her hand for comfort.
Note: My wife and I both noticed that adult-Jane bears a plausible familial resemblance to Margaret (younger and older versions), which made us wonder if perhaps Jane’s boyfriend David might’ve been subconsciously attracted to someone who helped him during a shared past trauma…
In one of the movie’s most disturbing scenes, young Margaret and young David have their DNA ‘imbued’ against their will to become involuntary future operatives on behalf of the aliens’ plan. David is given knowledge of the alien language, while Margaret is given their super-empathy power.
Note: How is the aliens’ genetic experimentation on children against their will any better than what Wardex is doing? Were there no consenting adults these child-abducting aliens could’ve invited? I’d bet the aliens could’ve found hundreds of eager adult human volunteers for abduction/experimentation. In his latest book, “Take Me to Your Leader,” astrophysicist/author Neil deGrasse Tyson freely states he’d love to be abducted by aliens, if only to definitively prove their existence to the world, which is the aliens’ goal in this movie. Consent always matters.
Margaret wields the deus ex machina gizmo to help create a cloaking spell–er, escape from surrounding Wardex pursuers, who’ve tracked them to the warehouse.
Note: This scene combines two things I’m not fond of; deus ex machina escapes and alien god tech (the alien gizmo does damn-near everything). Once again, this movie plays heavily on Spielberg’s personal belief that aliens can somehow magically solve most of our Earthly issues. Spielberg’s view on aliens–shared by many other people–seems to border on the religious worship of them as godlike, magical beings. Such worship is given lip service in the film when Margaret screams “Don’t worship me!” to a reverentially kneeling woman, though it still occurs, nevertheless.
Wardex locates the warehouse with Margaret’s recreated childhood home inside–but she’s cloaked the entire operation from the eyes of Noah and his agents. Stretching their luck, Margaret and the others then use a cloaked but still audible fire engine in order to escape…
Note: So the cloaking device works, but not on sound or on the light emitted by the gizmo itself. Did anyone on Noah’s crack team think to use infrared scopes to locate where the mysterious firetruck sounds and the gizmo’s light were coming from? For a company capitalizing on alien technology, they don’t use it wisely.
Outside TV station KCXE in Kansas City, Missouri, anxious onlookers follow the action on their smartphones as David’s stolen hard drives chronicling Wardex’s 70-odd years of conspiring to keep aliens a lucrative secret are finally uploaded to the networks and made public on, you guessed it, Disclosure Day.
Note: In the 21st century, most people would definitely filter these alien revelations through their smartphones, though it saps some of the wonder I felt in 1977 watching characters physically looking up towards the nighttime sky to see massive, looming spaceships in CE3K. Seeing a swarm of glowing smartphones reminded me more of, well… sitting in a 21st century movie theater.
Among the data uploaded to networks across the country (and the world), we see images of soldiers recovering dead aliens at a crash site in 1947 New Mexico (a reminder the actual “Roswell Incident” occurred some 75 miles away from the city of Roswell). We’re told the footage is authentic because it contains “ground truth pixels.” Uh huh…
During David’s info dump, we continue to see montages of various alien encounters, including a brief flash of Devil’s Tower (the site of Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) and another encounter where living aliens were recovered.
Note: While I’m no expert on AI photo manipulation, I do understand that ‘ground truth pixels’ are supposed to be human-verified backgrounds and characters that have not been digitally augmented or altered in any way. I don’t see how the newsroom had the time to independently verify the rapidly streaming Roswell footage and other alien encounter video images captured on David’s flash drives. To be honest, none of it feels any more ‘real’ than what I’d expect to see in a Special Edition of “Alien Autopsy” or some other high-end hoax.
After the show, Hugo wheels out a seemingly infirm alien kept alive in an oxygen tent. The aged alien communicates to David, who turns and whispers the translated ‘message’ to Margaret. Margaret is then given the news anchor’s chair, where she turns to the camera and begins relaying the alien’s words–just before the end credits roll.
Note: If aliens really wanted to make themselves known, why can’t they just land a damned spaceship outside the steps of the United Nations Building, or a fleet at spaceships at various national capitols around the world (see: Kenny Johnson’s “V”)? And did Hugo just happen to have this old alien waiting in the backstage green room at KCXE News? Where did it come from? If aliens really wanted to make themselves known to the entire world at once, they could find much easier ways to do so without manipulating animals and other earthly meat-puppets as their involuntary sleeper-agents/couriers.
The End.
Summing It Up
Young Margaret has a close encounter of the furry kind, as the aliens work through animals to reach humans.
“Disclosure Day” is a paradoxical movie. It has a marvelous cast, including Emily Blunt, Colin Firth, Josh O’Connor, and Eve Hewson. There are also some nail-biting pursuit sequences that homage classics like Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest,” as well as Steven Spielberg’s own filmography, including “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and 1971’s “Duel” (the railway crossing sequence). Spielberg is a directorial maestro who intuitively understands the language of cinema the same way his longtime composer-collaborator John Williams understands music.
However, this movie’s considerable talent pool can’t overcome a weak and frankly outdated story, which is its greatest stumbling block. In light of more recent, scientifically meticulous movies like “The Arrival” and “Project Hail Mary,” the dated, 1990s-looking gray aliens of “Disclosure Day” feel like “X-Files” leftovers– particularly in the wake of Simon Pegg’s brilliant alien conspiracy comedy, “Paul,” which already lampooned “Disclosure Day” (almost beat for beat) some 15 years ago.
The quasi-godlike, humanoid grays of this movie feel more like Spielberg’s quest for the divine rather than alien life evolved in another star system. Spielberg’s transcendent aliens can read (and control) minds, and even go so far as to imbue two young, non-consenting human children with altered DNA in the long-shot hope this unwitting, sleeper-agent dyad will somehow create a future kumbaya moment for humanity–assuming they’re not incarcerated, shot, or run-down by the obsessed agents of Wardex, of course. Yeah… solid plan, E.T.
Despite well-crafted moments, and some excellent performances, I can’t help feeling this out-of-step film might’ve been a bit more impactful had it been released in 1996 instead of 2026. As far as Steven Spielberg’s alien movie tetralogy goes, “Disclosure Day” is by far the weakest.
Where to Watch
As of this writing, “Disclosure Day” is in wide theatrical release, but given that it’s a Universal Pictures release, it’ll most likely appear on the Peacock streaming service, when it eventually goes digital.