BREAKING: There Might Be Aliens. Spielberg Would Like a Word.
A review of Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day
Between the trailer, the title, and Steven Spielberg's familiar tendencies, you can almost predict the entire plot of Disclosure Day (2026). The story follows Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City weather anchor portrayed by Emily Blunt, who abruptly discovers she can read minds, speak unfamiliar languages, and intuitively track down a man holding answers about her abilities. Skipping to the film's climax after two hours of inane chasing—with a solemn one-liner rivaling Jared Leto's tacky "It's Morbin Time"—Margaret declares, "This is disclosure day," revealing that extraterrestrial life exists and that the truth has been concealed for over seventy years by a corporation called Wardex. The deeper message arrives through an alien speaking off-stage and it goes: "Listen." This call-to-action needle-drop is meant to trigger empathy—not primarily toward one another, but toward the aliens. This is essentially the philosophical payload of a $115 million Spielberg film, and I have just saved you two and a half hours and the price of a ticket. In essence, Disclosure Day is a vehicle for David Koepp's ragged script and Spielberg's reheated alien nachos, carried almost entirely by Emily Blunt's phenomenal performance.
Margaret's awakening coincides with Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), a straight-out-of-jail recruit for Wardex who steals files exposing a government conspiracy dating back to the Truman administration: decades of alien exploitation, experimentation, and reverse-engineering. Pursued alongside his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), the pair flee Wardex and its corporate enforcer, Scanlon (Colin Firth). The first act's most compelling character, however, is Jane—a former nun struggling with whether revealing extraterrestrial life might undermine her faith by challenging the idea of God as the supreme being.
"I don't think you lost your faith in God. I think you lost your faith in people."
It is a fascinating premise with the potential to explore profound philosophical questions. Unfortunately, the film abandons it almost immediately. The good news is that it is not the only meaningful idea introduced and then discarded.
The film is ninety percent chase sequences with ludicrous blocking and the plot constantly bends to accommodate Spielberg's aliens at the expense of character development. Unlike Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Disclosure Dayis less interested in extraterrestrials than in humans confronting personal struggles while pursuing a universal mission. Margaret and Daniel, in an almost Adam-and-Eve fashion, journey through external evil and personal trauma in search of truth. It is an admirable idea but one that collapses because none of the characters possess much dimension.
Daniel quickly devolves from one of the "chosen" into the obligatory hacker archetype once Margaret enters the story. Scanlon, the embodiment of Wardex's corporate evil, receives a brief moment of vulnerability through a vision of his deceased wife, yet the film never explores how that loss shapes his worldview which we assume is the basis for this entire chase. Hugo, meanwhile, suffers from the most baffling writing of all. He spends years constructing a meticulous replica of Margaret's childhood home so she can confront her past and “unlock” her true potential—a needlessly elaborate and unhinged solution; had the goal simply been exposing the conspiracy, Hugo already possessed a living extraterrestrial capable of doing precisely that.
Character depth is a prerequisite for meaningful empathy. Watching an animal suffer, or seeing the extraterrestrials tortured in Daniel's footage, evokes sympathy, but sympathy alone fades. Empathy demands enough intimacy to imagine inhabiting another person's life—to feel as they feel rather than merely recognize their suffering. That requires relatability, time, and emotional investment. What Disclosure Day offers is glorified sympathy, fleeting enough to disappear before the credits roll.
Emily Blunt nearly overcomes this limitation. After Margaret and Daniel are chased to their limits on the train tracks, Margaret suffers a devastating panic attack—the film's most honest moment of disclosure. Shaking uncontrollably and struggling to speak, mumbling incoherently about her father, she exposes a vulnerability that creates the story's deepest human connection. For two minutes, the audience is finally invited to "listen": to what people carry in silence, what remains unspoken, and what can only be healed through genuine human connection. It is the clearest expression of what confronting the past and growing should mean, accomplished with far less spectacle than Hugo's Bob the Buildersubplot. Naturally, thanks to David Koepp's screenplay, this breakthrough contributes almost nothing to the actual plot. Hugo still delivers the decisive revelation, and the film moves on to more chasing.
The film's emotional climax is delivered not by Margaret, but by Courtney Grace, an unnamed news anchor reporting live as Daniel's footage is broadcast worldwide. Her performance is a standout—every expression measured, every stutter perfectly placed—as she reacts to humanity's first glimpse of extraterrestrial life. Set against a montage of stunned viewers across the globe, she becomes the first domino in the transition from sympathy toward empathy. Within this sequence, two revelations unfold simultaneously. The first is the sheer enormity of discovering extraterrestrial life. The second—and the one Grace captures most powerfully—is witnessing the torture and exploitation of these beings, their screams echoing through earbuds around the world as humanity is asked, if only briefly, to empathize.
This is where my real frustration with Disclosure Day stands. Somewhere in the background, the news casually mentions Russia and North Korea as the world teeters on the brink of war. The detail is treated almost as set dressing, yet among those watching the broadcast are soldiers on their way to the front lines. At that point, I found myself asking Jane's question all over again: what happens after we all know? The film argues that knowledge alone should awaken our collective empathy. But didn't we already know? The story unfolds on the verge of a war in which people consciously choose to kill one another. That is exploitation and destruction by definition. The film's premise therefore collapses under its own logic. It spends two and a half hours manufacturing empathy through a decades-old alien conspiracy while a world in actual shambles exists just beyond the frame—because even if we stop harming extraterrestrials, we still harm each other.
Unlike Mickey 17, which uses a nonhuman stand-in to make empathy more immediate and legible, Disclosure Dayoffers no such insight. Instead, it asks us to endure strained dialogue, abandoned themes, and underwritten characters before concluding with a command to "Listen." There is an outdated audacity to that ending. We are here, in the big 2026, with our world already in crisis, and Spielberg wants to remind us that extraterrestrials might exist.
You can feel the film's moral uncertainty throughout. Unlike Spielberg's earlier work, this story is not truly about aliens; it is about us. Yet it never resolves its central contradiction: can confronting our cruelty toward extraterrestrials somehow prevent the cruelty we inflict on one another? It is tactless timing to build a world so closely resembling our own only to remind us that humanity is capable of terrible things while insisting our empathy be redirected toward extraterrestrials because they are helpless and happen to have three fingers, despite also being all-knowing and immensely powerful.
We're listening—but are we hearing ourselves?