Despite real-world hype, Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” doesn’t quite reach out-of-this-world movie fun.
When people make top five lists of Steven Spielberg alien flicks, including “E.T.,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” even “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” “Disclosure Day” will likely be listed at the bottom, if it makes the cut at all.
Amid a zeitgeist of government UFO disclosures, Spielberg returns to the alien genre with a story fit for the times. “Disclosure Day,” however, doesn’t quite live up to his now classic films that have become cultural touchstones.
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Margaret (Emily Blunt) is career-driven TV meteorologist and she’s on her way up the media ladder at her local Kansas City TV news station. But that plan is put on the backburner when she suddenly starts speaking foreign languages, including some odd clicks and grunts. While many assume she is having a medical emergency, it alerts nefarious figures who are now chasing her. Elsewhere, Dr. Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is on the run from those same nefarious figures, including the mysterious Noah (Colin Firth). He’s on a mission to tell the truth to the world. But that mission isn’t so easy. It will involve covert action and spy level intrigue. Perhaps together, they can disclose what they know to the world.
While “Disclosure Day” has aliens at its core, the film isn’t really about aliens. It’s about humans and whether our species is mature enough to receive revolutionary information about the universe. It measures our belief systems, religious traditions, and our moral compasses against such a shocking revelation. If aliens truly are real, could humans handle it? Would we go nuts, go religious, go defensive, or perhaps grow up?
You can expect action and thrills, but don’t expect aliens to be running alongside Margaret and Kellner.
As such, “Disclosure Day” is very much like 1997’s “Contact” where, despite the what the name implies, contact with aliens is far from the purpose of the film. Instead, “Contact” is heavy on contrasting science with religion and humanity’s journey to become a greater species, to evolve past petty Earthly conflicts. “Disclosure Day” is all of that (right down to the contrast of aliens and religion), heightened with some espionage, thrills, and a dash of action. And just as “Contact” was about the work toward making contact, “Disclosure Day” is more about the adventure en route to disclosure day.
That’s largely where “Disclosure Day” falls apart. It relies on action sequences to grab your attention — car chases, shoot-outs, making great leaps over dangerous gaps, all while drawing out these scenes far longer than they need be. This is thickly layered over the premise of revealing alien truth. It brings a movie with an out-of-this-world theme down to a generic, even cliché, level. It ends up being the kind of movie where people trip while running, or jump to a ledge only to barely catch the edge and struggle to climb to safety — probably while somebody is shooting at you, because why not?
Spielberg has promoted “Disclosure Day” as being “less about what I could imagine and much more about what other people have actually witnessed and experienced in the world, in different countries, in terms of eye witnessing UFOs, now being called UAPs.” But the movie is still very much rooted in fiction. It merely plays off the real-world zeitgeist, with the U.S. government releasing decades of UFO files. But it loses touch with any reality around this news.
For example, Spielberg incorporates the idea of crop circles, a phenomenon / hoax that has long been debunked. But it is presented in “Disclosure Day” as a genuine aspect of alien activity on Earth.
It also comes shortly after the documentary “The Age of Disclosure” created considerable buzz in 2025. That documentary was all about presenting government officials and others with credentials to talk about the truth “they” don’t want you to know about — the secrets agencies are keeping, the alien technology that is covertly being studied.
“Disclosure Day” feeds off that level of conspiracy theory that has been present in American pop culture since the 1940s. Spielberg was partially inspired to make this movie after reading a 2017 New York Times report “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s mysterious U.F.O. program.” Those headlines keep coming.
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But this movie only plays in this paranoid genre and is more interested in the fictional aspects of UFOs and aliens among pop culture.
Despite that dive into alien fiction, “Disclosure Day” carries a vibe of “Whoa, can you believe it! Aliens, man! This stuff is wild.” While that might have worked well in previous Spielberg alien flicks, such as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” it doesn’t work as well in an age of real government disclosure of UFO investigations.
Disclosure Day
2/5 stars
Screen or stream? Stream. You can wait to stream this one at home.
Rated PG-13