(Above: Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor in Disclosure Day (2026). © Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.)

By M. Faust

The ads for Disclosure Day ask, “What would you do if you discovered that all those post-Roswell stores about aliens were true? Would it change how you perceive the world? How would contemporary civilizations react?” The very title leads us to presume that this intriguing (if whimsical) question will be the subject of the film. 

But Steven Spielberg punts on his own premise. The movie ends at precisely the point where it gets to the question we thought it was going to be illustrating. 

Simply put, Disclosure Day is a two and a half-hour chase movie, a chase almost entirely lacking in drama because we know how it is going to end up. Even if you were to come to this movie cold, not having seen the trailers that show a world-wide television dump of US government videos proving the presence of extraterrestrials on our planet, it’s unlikely that you would take seriously at any point the possibility that the bad guys might stop the good guys. This is clearly not that kind of movie. 

The chasees are two. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is a cybersecurity expert. Until recently he was employed by a quasi-governmental agency, Wardex, that controls (and profits from) all knowledge of alien visitors to earth. Daniel has made copies of all of Wardex’s video files and wants to show them to the public: “This truth belongs to the whole world.”

Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is a Kansas City weather reporter whose adult life has been marked by impulses she can neither explain nor resist. (Can this possibly not remind us of Close Encounters of the Third Kind?). 

During a television broadcast she begins speaking a language consisting of clicks and other odd noises. This comes to the attention of Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), leader of an organization of Wardex defectors who, like Daniel, want to expose it to the world. Hugo contacts Margaret and tells her to seek out Daniel. Instructions aren’t necessary, he advise her—just follow her instincts. 

The bad guys of Wardex are lead by Noah Scanlon, one of those ridiculously hands-on CEOs who gets involved with every aspect of his company’s dirty work. He is played by Colin Firth in a beard that makes him look like comic Nate Bargatze (particularly unfortunate given that Bargatze’s terrible The Breadwinner is currently stinking up every multiplex in the country.) 

Margaret and Daniel are accompanied by their significant others: Jackson (Wyatt Russell), an unbelievably tolerant musician, and Jane (Eve Hewson), a former nun. Jane would likely be the most interesting character in a film that was actually about having everything you believe about the world disrupted. But she and Jackson are simply cardboard figures shoehorned in to give Margaret and Daniel people to explain parts of the plot to, and are summarily jettisoned when they have filled that purpose. 

To the same end, there is a Device, either given to us by or taken from the aliens, that allows the possessor to do various impossible things. This is the laziest kind of plot device to accomplish narrative movement, and Spielberg and Koepp should be ashamed of themselves for resorting to it. 

Did I mention that while all of this is going on, the world is on the brink of World War III. Sorry. The script pays so little attention to it that it’s easy to forget. 

There’s a game I like to play when I get bored with a movie: would the removal of any given scene affect the movie in any substantial way? Pretty much all of Disclosure Day up to the climactic half hour flunks this test big time. In fact, what is on screen looks like a 200 minute movie from which the first 45 minutes was lopped off. But despite starting in medias res (with a literal big boot in our faces), the chase story is so rote that we have no trouble filling in the blanks. 

I would like to tell you that the movie is redeemed by that final half hour, but my mother brought me up not to tell lies. Up to that point the story has meandered tediously, killing time. The climax, on the other hand, piles absurdity on top of absurdity. I can’t go into detail without giving away too much (though the plot makes so little sense that I had to spend the evening after I watched the movie reading online discussions to try to figure out what was supposed to be taking place). 

Much is being made of the very end shot of the film, in which the world is instructed to “Listen.” Spielberg has said that Disclosure Day is actually about the need for empathy. That’s a very nice sentiment that no one but a sociopath could argue with. But the social media era has made it easy to weaponize empathy: There are too many nutcases, evil or ignorant, looking to fill our heads with nonsense by pretending to play to our humanity. 

Spielberg is a product of the 1950s, an era of complacency and apathy. In the modern era, people don’t care too little: they care about the wrong things, their emotions perpetually manipulated by players who understand the value of outrage over understanding. We should work to have open minds, no doubt. But telling us simply to “Listen” is Pollyana-ism, especially as the culmination of a movie that has done next to nothing to expand our intellects. 

PS. For those of you who have already seen the movie and might have wondered: Saint Clare of Assisi is the patron saint of television, eye disorders and clear weather.