Disclosure Day Review - Spielberg’s Most Urgent Film Yet
There is a scene in Disclosure Day where a weathergirl from Kansas City, in the middle of her routine broadcast, stops mid-sentence as if struck by something invisible – and begins speaking in a language of tongue clicks and glottal, metallic clacks that no human being has ever been recorded producing. Then she faints.
That scene, and the particular quality of unease it produces – not horror exactly, but something adjacent to it, something that lives in the space between wonder and dread – tells you almost everything you need to know about what Steven Spielberg is up to in his latest and most philosophically expansive science fiction film.
Spielberg has been asking the same essential question for fifty years. Close Encounters of the Third Kind asked it with the awe of a man standing at the edge of something incomprehensibly large. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial asked it with the tenderness of a child who has never been taught to be afraid. War of the Worlds asked it with the terror of a civilization confronting something that does not care whether it survives. Each time, the question has been the same: what does it mean for us to not be alone? And each time, the answer has been different – shaped by the particular fears and hopes and preoccupations of the moment in which the film was made.
Disclosure Day arrives fifty years later, and the answer Spielberg gives here is perhaps his most urgent. This is a film made by a man who understands that time is running out – not merely for himself, but for the particular vision of humanity that his entire career has been dedicated to defending. The film’s deepest conviction, expressed through every image and gesture and plot turn, is that compassion and creativity and wonder are not weaknesses to be managed but the very things that make human life worth preserving. In a cultural moment when those qualities are under considerable pressure, Disclosure Day offers them as its central argument.
The screenplay by David Koepp weaves two storylines together with the elegant purposefulness of a structure that reveals its full shape only at the end. Daniel Kellner, played with vulnerability by Josh O’Connor, is a government cybersecurity expert turned rogue who possesses classified evidence of extraterrestrial contact being suppressed by a shadowy organization called Wardex. He is being hunted by Wardex’s representative, Noah Scanlon – Colin Firth, whose capacity for civilized menace has rarely been deployed more effectively.
And then there is Margaret Fairchild. Emily Blunt plays the Kansas City weathergirl as a woman of simple, genuine delight – someone who has found joy in the ritual of announcing the weather, whose enthusiasm for an approaching hailstorm is delivered with a shimmy that her boyfriend Jackson, played by Wyatt Russell, finds adorable when it is manageable and less endearing when it becomes something more. The cardinal that flies through the window of her home and greets her is the first sign that something is choosing Margaret, not the other way around. What follows – the Russian words flowing from a woman who does not speak Russian, the on-air episode of clicking alien language, the MRI that reveals nothing – is Spielberg operating at the peak of his capacity for the uncanny, building dread not through conventional horror mechanics but through the specific unease of the impossible occurring in entirely ordinary circumstances.
What Margaret and Daniel share, and how that connection resolves the film’s central mystery, I will leave for the audience to discover. What I will say is that the resolution earns the film’s ambition – that it delivers on the philosophical weight Disclosure Day has been accumulating without reducing that weight to a simple answer. This is a film full of ideas, from telepathy to Catholic mysticism to the ways human cruelty can override human generosity, and it holds all of them simultaneously without being crushed by them. There is real pleasure in this – the pleasure of a filmmaker at full command of his instrument, deploying his formidable technical gifts in service of something that matters to him deeply.
The action sequences are shot and edited with a visual clarity that has become increasingly rare in contemporary cinema – most notably a set piece involving a car being dragged alongside a speeding train that achieves a genuinely terrifying kinetic momentum. Spielberg knows how to cut action for spatial comprehension rather than mere stimulation, and the contrast between these sequences and the film’s quieter, more intimate passages gives the whole a rhythm that feels like breathing.
Throughout, the film accumulates a series of images that could seem sentimental in lesser hands and instead feel genuinely moving. Spielberg’s belief in the benevolence of whatever lies beyond our understanding – alien intelligences, divine providence, the as-yet-unrevealed secrets of science – has always expressed itself through this catalog of earthly wonder. The film suggests that what the aliens, wherever they are, have to teach us is not technology or cosmology but attention – the capacity to notice what we are always surrounded by and have been trained to overlook.
At 79, Spielberg has made a film that feels like both a culmination and a beginning. The themes are familiar to anyone who knows his work: the extraterrestrial as an emissary of hope rather than threat, technology as a force that illuminates and endangers in equal measure, the transcendent possibilities hidden within the ordinary. But Disclosure Day does not feel like repetition. It feels like a filmmaker who has been working his way toward a particular statement across an entire career and has finally found the precise form in which to make it – an eleventh-hour plea to reconnect with all that makes us human.
Spielberg has spoken openly about his belief in intelligent extraterrestrial life. He would, by his own admission, love to meet one. But the film he has made is not ultimately about the aliens. It is about us – about what we risk losing, and about whether we will recognize the best aspects of what we are before we have finished destroying it.