Steven Spielberg has made a lot of movies about aliens, but it has been a while since he made one that felt like this. Disclosure Day, out today in theaters, is his first original screen story in years, and it lands as a deliberate callback to the stretch of his career that gave us A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, War of the Worlds, and Munich. That run was defined by Spielberg’s humanist instincts colliding with real anxiety about shadow institutions, surveillance, and a present built on hidden pasts. Disclosure Day picks that thread back up, just with aliens layered on top.
The Story
The plot follows Dr. Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity expert played by Josh O’Connor, who becomes a whistleblower after uncovering proof that humanity is not alone. Once he goes public, a powerful corporation puts him on the run. Along the way he crosses paths with Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City TV meteorologist played by Emily Blunt, who has been experiencing strange phenomena of her own. The two team up to get the truth out before the people trying to bury it catch up with them.
The cast around them is stacked. Colin Firth plays Noah Scanlon, Eve Hewson plays Jane Blankenship, and Colman Domingo plays Hugo Wakefield, alongside Wyatt Russell, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, and Elizabeth Marvel in supporting roles. The screenplay comes from David Koepp, working from a story by Spielberg himself, and the production reunites some serious heavyweights, cinematography from Janusz Kaminski, editing from Sarah Broshar and Michael Kahn, and a score from John Williams.
What Works
The film’s central question is right there in the marketing. If you found out we were not alone, if someone actually proved it to you, would that frighten you. That question carries the whole movie, and it gives Spielberg room to do what he does best, take a huge, almost unimaginable premise and ground it in characters who feel like real people reacting the way real people would.
Comparisons to Duel and Minority Report have already started circulating, and they make sense. There is a chase movie energy running underneath the bigger science fiction ideas, ordinary people being pursued by something much larger and more powerful than they are, just with extraterrestrial stakes layered on top. One early review called it the kind of movie that would work purely as a summer popcorn mystery on its own, while also functioning as a meaningful piece within Spielberg’s larger body of work, almost autobiographical in how it returns to themes he has circled before.
Emily Blunt has spoken about what it was like working with Spielberg, calling him something like a mentor figure and describing the experience as one of the privileges of her career. That kind of reverence from a cast member usually means something, and it shows up in the performances. O’Connor and Blunt both carry real weight in their roles, and the chase across the film’s two hour twenty five minute runtime never feels like it is just killing time between set pieces.
Where It Stumbles
While the film raises real questions about faith and meaning, it does not always land on solid ground when it tries to answer them. The back half has a more hazy spiritual landscape. That tracks with some of Spielberg’s other work in this mode. War of the Worlds had a similar issue, big ideas about belief and meaning that the film gestures at more than it fully resolves.
The PG-13 rating comes with action violence, some bloody images, and strong language, which is a notable shift from the more family friendly tone of Spielberg’s most beloved alien films. This is closer to the tone of Minority Report than E.T., and audiences expecting something gentler should know that going in.
The Verdict
Disclosure Day is Spielberg working in a register he has not fully revisited in years, and for the most part it works. The central pairing of O’Connor and Blunt gives the film a strong emotional core, the chase structure keeps things moving, and John Williams’ score does what John Williams scores do. The spiritual questions the film raises do not all land cleanly, but the journey getting there is genuinely compelling, and as a piece of big budget summer filmmaking from one of the all time greats, it delivers more than enough to be worth your time.
Disclosure Day is now playing in theaters. Rated PG-13. Distributed by Universal Pictures. Directed by Steven Spielberg.
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