“Disclosure Day”

by  Chris  Stewart 07.2026

The 20th century, for Steven Spielberg, was defined by how the modern person deals with wonder and reconciles adventure with fear. In the 21st century, he's tilted that same unmatched skill towards the question of great revelation, asking whether humankind is worthy of the paradigm-shifting advancements. In some cases these have been scientific (Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, Ready Player One), in other cases societal (Lincoln, The Post, West Side Story). In all cases, there has been hope in the darkness; childlike hope that what we don't understand can benefit us, reaffirming our ability to survive. At stake is the mind's capacity for both destruction and wonder and the question of why a world overseen by God would provide both.

In his finest recent outputs, decency either triumphs (Bridge of Spies, Lincoln, and The Post) or is shown to resist final decay by being irreparably frayed by it (Artificial Intelligence, Munich, West Side Story).

What, then, to make of his soppy, scattered return to the extraterrestrial with Disclosure Day?

The film's aims are admirable. Spielberg wants to wrestle with truth, control, and faith - asserting that what is real and plain will evidently win out in the end. And so it will. But in attempting this, he has given us a fractured, overplayed film that fails both as a genre exercise and as a call to think more closely about the world.

In 1993, given the impossible task of inspiring great wonder and great fear, he gave us Jurassic Park's Brachiosaurus and Tyrannosaurus scenes. To say that the images he conjures in Disclosure Day accomplish less is an understatement. We have here an unruly, miscast film. Studded, through and through, with excellent craft. But what could be sadder than perfectly-blocked, smartly-conceived moments which give way to a ludicrous, empty overall thrust?

Of the cast, Eve Hewson is superb, giving an underwritten character the soul and stakes needed to make a brilliant central scene hum as she is psycho-spiritually aggressed by Colin Firth. Sadly this is also exemplary of Disclosure Day as a very poor extraterrestrial film, though a fine-enough telepathy film. Josh O'Connor – who has earned his praise these past few years – is utterly lost, and Emily Blunt, much ballyhooed, flitters from fluff to fluff while unconvincingly playing at a figure gifted with the ability to move people to lay down their weapons for the sake of hallucinated glimpses of loved ones.

We've seen this done well. In Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, the revelation of something long-considered impossible builds to a heart-stopping sequence of guns laid down at the basic moment of belief. In Jeff Nichols' Midnight Special, a cult formed around a would-be messiah reckons with the cosmic nature of these claims. Here? A watery harkening back to the very-real horrors of Abu Graib, and moments where crop circles appear as if required by contract. Wonder bleeds through from time to time, but the message is as thin and anticlimactic as the film's final moment.

“Disclosure Day”

Director: Steven Spielberg

Runtime:145 minutes