There’s nothing lean about Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi epic Disclosure Day. Even the title has a portentous ring to it. What is it exactly that is to be disclosed? Is it a secret of the universe by any chance? Of course it is. Grandiosity to one side, Spielberg delivers an entirely enjoyable 145 minutes, in a set-the-controls-to-Spielberg kind of way. We’re here to be awed not enlightened.
Every character has a backstory and an arc, as if Spielberg and co-writer David Koepp were organising a children’s birthday party rather than making a big-bucks movie, and are determined that no one is to go home empty handed. There Dr Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a black hat techie who once worked for a shady megacorp but is now trying to expose what Wardex and its malign boss Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) are up to vis-à-vis alien visitation – think Dr Mengele’s experiments.
There’s Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), a onetime noviciate in a nunnery who now finds herself on the run with Kellner. Most of all there is Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a TV weathergirl and would-be news anchor suddenly able to read minds and speak all sorts of languages.
Spielberg has said that this is the last of his loose sci-fi trilogy beginning with Close Encounters and continuing with ET. There are cute references to both, though Spielberg is more indebted to the tech-fascist looks of Minority Report, particularly in his use of stark monochrome colourways. Lots of blacks.
Though behind even that is the Roswell incident, spindly aliens with bulbous heads and big almond eyes. In interviews, Spielberg comes across as having really bought into all this stuff. He also seems signed up to the conspiracy theory of modern governance – in flashback we see President Richard Nixon being given a tour of the scientific facility where unfortunate crashed aliens are not getting the reception they might have hoped for.
There is a discussion of the usefulness of religion as a civilisational cement – useful having a former trainee nun on hand – and the sneaking suspicion takes hold that Spielberg is in some way remaking The Matrix, with Margaret as a character hijacked by gifts she didn’t know she had, and Colman Domingo acting as the Morpheus to her Neo.
But in the main this is Spielberg putting on a display of “because I can” film-making. The way he enters and leaves scenes with swooping crane shots. The scene where a car drives into a farmhouse through one wall, then pauses before driving out the other wall. The largely gratuitous crop circle moment. The absolute cracker of a scene where a car and a speeding train tangle in a most enjoyably metal-grinding way. Hitchcock is also in here somewhere, in this iconic America of gas stations, freight trains and motels.
At a certain point the Gandalf problem arrives. A sense of jeopardy is hard to maintain when characters seemingly cannot be killed. Spielberg fills the gap, once drama has gone, with technical wizardry. Is anyone better at this than Spielberg?
The longer it goes on the flabbier it gets. There are more convoys of black SUVs than seem necessary. Whole chunks could be cut and the story wouldn’t suffer much. O’Connor and Hewson, charming though they are, could be excised entirely, leaving this as a grudge match between the malevolent Scanlon and new girl on the mat Fairchild.
Spielberg has said that his film isn’t sci-fi but science fact. Though what he appears to be after is something more akin to a religious experience – leave your legitimate scepticism at the door and prepare to be taken on a ride.
Profound, wide-eyed optimism is a strange default setting to have when your worldview is so profoundly bleak. But then that is religion for you.
Disclosure Day – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
