Steven Spielberg helps us believe.
Watching the movies he’s directed over the decades, we’ve come to believe that an archeology professor could moonlight as a Nazi-fighting treasure-hunter; that dinosaurs could once again walk the earth; that the wealthy owner of a prominent newspaper would do the right thing; that aliens are real, and one of them could be your best friend.
Disclosure Day finds Spielberg back on the alien beat, after Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. This time, the plot revolves around the potential revelation of extra-terrestrial evidence, involving a cybersecurity expert named Daniel (Josh O’Connor) and a television meteorologist named Margaret (Emily Blunt), who begins having strange, out-of-body experiences. They’re thrown together when Daniel turns whistleblower, with a nefarious, para-governmental agency known as WARDEX in pursuit. Spielberg receives a story credit, while the screenplay is by frequent collaborator David Koepp (Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, Crystal Skull).
Comparing Disclosure Day to the above titles, it’s clear Spielberg hasn’t lost a step. The movie literally kicks you in the face with its opening image, a POV shot from the vantage point of a wrestler being stomped in the face. He and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski have a field day with reflections throughout, creatively introducing characters or amping up the suspense. And each of the chase sequences moves with creativity and verve—foremost among them a crash-up between Daniel and Margaret’s car and a speeding train. The denouement to that scene, in which Margaret suffers a panic attack once they’re safely in a boxcsar full of rumbling pianos, is a master class in staging. It’s also Blunt’s finest moment, in a performance that blossoms from delightful screwball comedy at the start to heavy emotional lifting at the end.
If much of Disclosure Day is thrillingly familiar, one element is new to Spielberg’s work: its explicit ruminations on religious faith. This notion has been implicit since 1977’s Close Encounters, in which alien experiences stood in for divine revelation. In Disclosure Day, once Daniel’s girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) reveals that she planned to become a nun earlier in her life, the religious references start rolling in: in a moment of confrontation with the head of WARDEX (Colin Firth), Jane clutches her crucifix so intensely it wounds her hand, like stigmata; she has a conversation with a nun (Elizabeth Marvel) in which she worries that the revelation of alien life would cause people to abandon their faith; Margaret forecasts hail—one of the 10 plagues God cast on Egypt in the Hebrew Bible—and it comes true. I personally prefer when such religious resonance is left to be teased out by audiences, as it is in something like Close Encounters and E.T. This time, Spielberg and Koepp do the work for us.
Not that Disclosure Day is meant to be a religious film. The movie ultimately offers a humanist spin, arguing for empathy as humanity’s saving grace. This, too, requires a certain amount of belief, especially in a day and age when people seem eager to stomp on faces—or at least cheer those who do. Like Spielberg’s best alien films, however, Disclosure Day is a counter to cynicism and skepticism (even if it nonetheless acknowledges why we’re cynical and skeptical). The movie lobbies for our right to believe in something, particularly when the obfuscating powers of the day tighten their grip with a nihilistic lack of faith in anything but their own fear. Disclosure Day doesn’t leave us angry and defeated in the face of this. Instead, it nudges us toward possibility. You leave the theater ready, once again, to believe.
(7/16/2026)
