Movies & TV Disclosure Day Disclosure Day Should Have Remained Undisclosed Please get us away from this era where we explain away all the wonder of the universe and treat the entire population of the world as a reaction meme. By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on June 12, 2026 Credit: Niko Tavernise / Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Niko Tavernise / Universal Pictures There’s a monologue given by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) halfway through Disclosure Day to his old colleague Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth): He wants to let the man know that along the way, due to loss and grief, he got cynical and shut people out and decided that he knew better than everyone. Hugo hopes that he can convince Noah that the work they’ve done covering up “the truth” was a mistake because what’s waiting on the other side will—somehow—save us all. It’s clear that this moment is a core sentiment for the entire film, something that the writing of its script built to, or around, because it was important. And it’s just… not enough. Of anything. I’m a Spielberg kid. A great portion of the wonder I felt about the world can be laid directly at his feet—Close Encounters, E.T., Indiana Jones, Jaws, Jurassic Park, The Goonies, these were all stories that informed my base code as a human being. When I saw A.I. in the theater as a teen, I left sobbing uncontrollably. What I’m trying to say is that I’m no brand of cynic, and even the director’s more divisive swings have made an impact on me before. Disclosure Day should have worked on me, is the point. The trailers were concerningly vague, until they suddenly weren’t and pretty much gave the whole plot away: Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) and Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) were abducted as children, and now they’ve both been “activated” toward one goal: Letting the world know that aliens do exist, and the government and private sector have been keeping this from us for decades. The bad guys are the Wardex corporation, led by Noah Scanlon, while the good guys are led by Hugo Wakefield, a former employee who absconded with a lot of their cohort and some very important otherworldly tech. It’s time to show the world what the company has been hiding because people deserve that knowledge. Why do they deserve it? Well, because knowledge should be given freely, a point that Daniel makes to his former-nun-initiate girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) when she questions the wisdom of dropping this intel into the world’s lap like a very hot bowl of soup. This is one of many conversations that the film tries and fails to have because it can’t seem to decide how much dialogue is the correct amount. Are we watching a dense film where we get to know characters intimately? Not really. Are we watching a sparser, moodier story where inference is a part of the experience? Definitely not. Rather, the dialogue serves the purpose of telling you what you’re supposed to feel and think, and when you should do it. That conversation with Jane is playing at depth because it turns on her faith: As a deeply Christian person, she believes that this knowledge will make people turn away from God, a need that humans are wired for and will likely be replacing with alien beings. And that could be an interesting discussion to have, certainly, but it’s genuinely weird to see this movie (and so many others) ignore the fact that the world we live in now is generally less religious than it was three decades ago. That Jane seemingly forgets or ignores how many non-Christian religions there are across the world is hardly surprising for her character, but the genuine abandonment of religious faith, worldwide, belongs in this conversation too. Aliens aside, the United States has seen radical changes in religious demographics since the advent of the internet; as of 2026, Pew Research indicates that only a little over half of Americans are absolutely certain of the existence of God. In this way, and many others, Disclosure Day feels as though it should be set a few decades in the past—even couching this as an early aughts story would have alleviated some of the narrative puzzlement it’s wrestling with. Instead, the film is set in what’s ostensibly the near-future, as we’re on the brink of World War III— —oh right, that. Try not to think too much about that. The film gives you peripheral knowledge of this and treats the entire world’s population as background sims for all that we’re meant to care about them. We see frenzied purchase sprees at a gas station, hear some dour news reports in the background of other scenes, but don’t worry about it! It’s all going to be fixed by these special, magical people. Which is, in effect, the exact opposite of what made the best Spielberg movies so good, movies about completely ordinary folks with no powers or chosen one status, who came into contact with the extraordinary—be it sharks or flying saucers or mortality itself. Disclosure Day is, in all the ways that count, nothing more than an updated version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A strange choice to make, reduxing one of the greatest achievements in cinematic history with a milquetoast successor half a century later, but it does seem that a few directors are starting to feel like their audiences didn’t get the message the first time around. (The Wachowskis had similar trouble with The Matrix, but Resurrections actually managed to hit its brief in that regard.) And that does seem to be at least part of the point, as Hugo tells us, outright, in that Very Important Monologue: The aliens know that empathy is the most important evolutionary advantage, and they want to help us understand it too.  Did you get that everyone? Did it come through this time? We said it out loud, in very simple terms, so you can’t pretend you didn’t know that was the point. It’s empathy, dammit, show some. We’re here to learn about empathy—say it again for the people in the nosebleed section. The trouble is, the definition of empathy within the film is pretty, shall we say, wobbly. Because Daniel and Margaret were both abducted, remember? As kids, for the purpose of imbuing them with special abilities so that they could… help? The aliens? But also help humanity? (I’ll be good and not go down the rabbit hole of the film utterly swerving around the fact that the “benevolent” aliens abused and traumatized the hell out of two children for their special plans because we’d be here all day.) For some reason it had to be two kids, and the plot says that’s because they were given different gifts (one gift per brain, those are the rules)—Daniel had to be able to understand the mathematical codes of the universe and Margaret had to be able to understand people. In case you didn’t quite catch that, I’ll repeat it even more simply, like the film does with its plot points: The girl is good at empathy and the boy is good at math. This absurd gender-essentialist binary distinction just about knocked me out of the film entirely, and that’s without getting into what the movie seems to think empathy is, which is plain… telepathy? Margaret can read people’s minds when she looks at them, divine what they most need to hear, and tell them. It reads as very Jesus-y, for all the weird Christian allegory that the film is layering over alien knowledge and technology. Do I want to get into how weird it feels that the film is this Christian while coming from a famously Jewish director? I really don’t. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. The action holds up well, though the score from longtime collaborator John Williams has far too many flourishes from old scores he’s written for previous Spielberg films, to the point where it gets distracting. There are also too many points in the film where characters suddenly become idiots to make the plot do what it needs to do; paramilitary officers who can’t look behind them; cars that suddenly can’t turn, the baffling decision to blow up one thing and hit the off switch on the other thing. But what’s really depressing is that this is possibly the only time that I’ve seen multiple actors come out of a Spielberg film looking like they can’t act—and not just a few, practically the entire cast has these moments, where incredibly skilled performers just can’t make the lines come out naturally or can’t summon the necessary lived-in-ness of the person they’re playing. One point in particular had me almost launch out of my seat because it hit far too close to home and got it twisted around wrong: We learn early in the film that Margaret’s father had Parkinson’s Disease and died from it when she was young, a detail that seemed weirdly specific given how vague character histories had been thus far. Later on, she’s having a (completely justified) panic attack after surviving a big action scene, violently trembling—she stares at her hands, and literally sobs “the Parkinson’s, I can’t stop, like my father” and proceeds to have a breakdown thinking about her father’s illness and death. So… I have a father with Parkinson’s. And it’s true, you do get a little more scared about being in any way shaky, knowing that runs in your family and seeing what it does to a person you love. And to see them use that fear in the most hamfisted way possible, with lines that I’d expect from a story written by a child—well, it certainly didn’t feel good. What I experienced was the exact inverse of feeling “seen,” as we term it. There are so many similar scenes in other Spielberg films where this kind of thing hits home—and yes, I am thinking namely of Lex’s “he left us” breakdown in Jurassic Park, where you know exactly what she’s really talking about without her having to say “my parents are divorcing and when the lawyer ran from our car before the T-Rex attacked, it made me think of my dad leaving our family, and I could really use a replacement father figure right now, Dr. Grant,” which was also written by Disclosure Day’s screenwriter David Koepp!—but something (several somethings) is getting lost in this new breed of film. My real beef with Disclosure Day comes from the overarching thought at its center, when the end comes on with all the subtlety of a bulldozer. Because when all is said and done disclosed, no uplifting thought or meaning is waiting. We’re meant to believe that the entire world would halt at this revelation, the sudden knowledge that there is other life out there in the universe, and it would change us immediately. But it isn’t true, and so it doesn’t feel hopeful to watch, even as a fairy tale. This isn’t an era to tout The Magic Solution to Everything—rather, it’s an era that needs constant reminding that avoiding the end of the world is work. Work that we all have to show up for. I walked into the theater hoping for that good ol’ Spielbergian wonder and awe. What I got was a potent reminder that it’s bad out there, folks. Real bad. Even the funny bit with the firetruck couldn’t pull me back in.[end-mark] The post <i>Disclosure Day</i> Should Have Remained Undisclosed appeared first on Reactor.