Disclosure Day
2026
Director Steven Spielberg wears his heart on his sleeve in this film about UFOs.
But first we get intelligence agencies and their bullies dressed in black uniforms driving black SUVs chasing people in car chase sequences, people "who know too much" hiding in roadside motels and getting found out, and a bad guy (Colin Firth, somehow looking a lot like a menacing Brian Dennehy) able to "dive in" on people by using an outer-space tool that looks a bit like a joystick and in effect is a joystick since at times Firth's character can control people like a character in a video game.
Firth plays a frightened (and frightening) bad guy who is doing the dastardly things he does to control and manipulate people out of a somewhat understandable ambition: he doesn't want classified and secret UFO information to spill out all around the world and bring chaos and confusion to people, possibly precipitating the downfall of governments and religions. Around him are other bad guys who greedily want to hang on to the proprietary knowledge to be had from reverse-engineering UFO tech.
Firth's character gets a much more human and kinder wrinkle for his otherwise evil actions. He's worried and anxious: in this film, the "secret knowledge" of UFOs is so powerful that it "will change everything" if revealed, and a core conflict is that two forces with opposite attitudes are fighting an ad hoc intellectual argument about whether the people of the world can handle this "revelation" constructively or not. The obvious conflicting argument of whether aliens are good or bad, demons or just very bad pilots to be crashing so many ships onto the earth, isn't given a moments notice.
Whatever Spielberg does with a film, for a very long time it doesn't matter if it is boring or engaging, he'll have an excellent craftsmanship packaging the effort. His camera shows us details and his story has density, and visually he wants us to always be up to date and understand what's happening, something some directors can't always pull off and try to make up for by substituting it with speed. But Spielberg has speed, too, and Disclosure Day has a plot that hurtles forward like everything is important and as the personalities involved get physically closer together (there's a lot of running around in mid-America in cars like a storm-chaser movie) it amps up the Hitchcockian anxiety, sort of like how all the characters converged in Spielberg's much calmer, earlier film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
Whether intended or not, Spielberg decorates this movie with as many screens as he does humans, and since we're watching this movie on a screen, the film ends up commenting on itself in unusual ways. Bad-guy Colin Firth's government headquarters is literally covered inside with screens that fill up walls like a gigantic sports bar gone crazy; teams of news broadcast editors sit at banks of screens, endlessly watching (and deciding what gets viewed by everyone else); the "average" people in the movie are all staring at little white-glowing hand-held screens, and one of our main heroes, Josh O'Connor as Dr. Daniel Kellner, repeatedly uses a little phone screen to show off space alien videos (which are of course amplified a hundred-fold on a theater screen) to show us Truth.
Beyond that, alien powers turn people into screens, in effect, causing them to appear like holographs where they actually are not, and to put two people together in a room, sitting across from each other in chairs, though they're really hundreds of miles apart. In Spielberg-world, truth are visuals and visuals are truth, and screens (whether flat screens or human beings) are an evidence that replaces faith (though Spielberg's story goes to the trouble to integrate traditional religious ideas, misquotes and all, into his UFO vision. I take it he is probably not wanting to leave anybody out, except for, of course, the greedy bad guys).
But, Spielberg also shows us a host of magic tricks, such as when the "joystick" turns out to be able to "cloud men's minds" (like The Shadow) and in effect make a whole house and the people around it disappear from view but still be present. We the audience can see them, but the government agents in black are consternated. Films themselves are a magic trick and probably there's no way around trying to present "truth" of any sort on a screen without it stumbling over that manufactured context.
Emily Blunt is engaging as the main film character and brings much needed humor (a problem with propaganda is that it's usually a humorless affair) as a weather lady who becomes a medium for outer space beings and their empathic knowledge of humans. This "empathy," which gets short-handed into just hugging, is a part of Spielberg's overall agenda, which is apparently like a nicer version of a Jack Chick tract, that is, to convince the audience, rationally, on the UFO belief system. In the course of the story, bit by bit, Spielberg is pulling back a curtain on a magician's stage, and finally you're confronted with a preacher standing there instead of a guy in a top hat pulling up rabbits. Disclosure Day is the heart-felt Spielbergian message to not ignore all the evidence but to "listen," as the Weatherlady says, staring out from the screen.
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Original Page June 23, 2026