Review: ‘Disclosure Day’ has the exhilarating, wide-eyed wonder only Spielberg can deliver
2026 / Dir. Steven Spielberg
Rating: 4/5
Watch if you like: any movie ever made by Steven Spielberg, The X-Files, the naively hopeful belief that the world would come together when we find out we’re not alone in the universe but you know it would just be stupid discourse about whether the aliens were “woke” or not.
Steven Spielberg’s return to extraterrestrial territory doesn’t make a secret of the fact that aliens exist, and a shadowy corporate entity, Wardex, has been keeping it under wraps from humanity for the benefit of government defense contractors. In fact, we already begin right where most movies would start their third act, with on-the-run Wardex employee Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) cornered by Wardex private security who have kidnapped his girlfriend and forced him to return data he’s stolen to leak to the public.
This is all part of the plan: Kellner is part of a much larger group of Wardex employees led by Hugo (Colman Domingo), who is trying to orchestrate a mass disclosure that no one can ignore. Traveling with his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), Kellner has to avoid the cold and ruthless director of Colin Firth, who you would never think made a career out of charming, romantic roles based on how genuinely scary he is in Disclosure Day, particularly due to limited telepathic abilities enabled by alien technology.
The other side of the coin is Margaret (Emily Blunt), a small-time meteorologist in Kansas City who mysteriously gains the ability to speak other languages and read people’s thoughts. After appearing to speak a guttural alien language on television, she soon becomes a target for Wardex as she feels a subconscious pull to find Daniel Kellner. Blunt’s performance makes Disclosure Day. She plays Margaret’s new abilities with this madcap glee that’s ripe with a mix of uncertainty and joy. It’s incredibly fun watching her drawn to a random person, seemingly peering into their mind, and responding by helping them solve a problem in their life. You never quite know what she’s going to do next, giving the film a unique momentum, even when it can often play like a catalog of Spielberg’s greatest hits and familiar alien iconography.
A mix of political thriller and on-the-run chase film, Disclosure Day has more similarities with Minority Report for most of its runtime than any of Spielberg’s previous alien movies. There’s a similarly desaturated color palette, the constant threat of being found by squads of agents, and a handful of spectacularly tense setpieces like a car chase vs. a moving train. O’Connor is no Tom Cruise, though, and plays Kellner the same overly emotive way he did his priest in Wake Up Dead Man, which just doesn’t work in such a different context.
To be fair, the screenwriter, David Koepp, doesn’t give the Kellner character any sort of arc compared to Margaret. The process of Kellner becoming aware of alien existence and deciding to become an Edward Snowden-esque whistleblower already happened before the film started. His sections are still thrilling, but there’s more reward when we return to see what Margaret is doing with her newfound abilities while also on the run. As his conspiracy thriller companion, Eve Hewson wasn’t given much to work with, either, as Jane, apart from an underbaked crisis of faith that feels out of step with the current American religious climate and doesn’t have much of a payoff.
While some clunky scriptwriting aside, and some very fake CGI animals—don’t even get me started—might keep Disclosure Day from being a top-tier Spielberg film, it’s continually exhilarating and full of the type of wonder only he can deliver. That’s particularly true of the wide-eyed, open-hearted ending that, rather than the sentimentalism Spielberg is often accused of, feels like the fading dream of a world where there’s a possibility of anything that could pull us away from our self-destructive echo chambers.
A final word of warning: try to avoid any trailers or TV spots for Disclosure Day if you haven’t seen them yet. The marketing department spoils many moments from the final 30 minutes, which will likely sap some of the wonder from the ending.