'Disclosure Day': Nobody Does It Better Than Spielberg
- August Hammel
- Jun 10
- 6 min read
Look up at the sky. Listen. Can you hear it?
Steven Spielberg has asked this of millions for over 50 years, beginning with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), but with Disclosure Day, he seems to be asking it of himself, too. A new blockbuster from the most commercially successful director in history is always an event – this being an understatement – especially when it involves aliens. With Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982), Spielberg instilled in his audiences a sense of wonder so profound that they shaped how people approached aliens altogether. His late-century double did heavy lifting on shifting the American cultural understanding that aliens are something to be feared toward something to be curious of, awestruck by, and open to. With his post-9/11 adaptation of War of the Worlds (2005), he considered the possibility that their presence could beget darker consequences, but unite humanity all the same. Twenty-one years later, at the age of 79, Spielberg looks to the skies and ask the big questions again.
Disclosure Day gets in late to its drama, starting in media res with whistleblower Daniel Keller (Josh O’Connor) already on the run from Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of the nefarious Wardex corporation, while the world is on the brink of WWIII. Carrying secrets that could expose the truth about extraterrestrial contact to the world, Keller and his girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson) strike out on the lam with the help of Wardex defector Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) while trying to connect with Kansas City forecaster Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), who is discovering secrets of her own.
To say any more is to ruin the fun of Disclosure Day which is defined, in part, by how withholding Spielberg is. From the startlingly blunt and adventurous opening that establishes the narrative stakes, he makes clear a brisk pace, easy tone and the promise that he’s focused on a journey rather than its destination. Harkening back to his first studio feature – the non-stop on the road chase of The Sugarland Express (1974) – and evoking perhaps unintentional notes of last year’s always-roving One Battle After Another, Spielberg crafts a long-haul chase film and plays with its progression on a scale he hasn’t worked with for a while.
The Adventures of Tintin (2011) and Ready Player One (2018) were big adventures made between historical dramas, but both were hamstrung with technological exhibitionism. Disclosure Day’s classical stylings and trimmings emit the sense that Spielberg is wading in more classical, comfortable territory, especially given longtime collaborator David Koepp’s wonderfully florid yet swift script, but his comfort is still almost anyone else’s mastery. Without fail, every sequence has at least one shot that exhibits his masterful understanding of how to block a scene, compose a shot and motivate his actors. Every couple of minutes, you’ll be graced with some of the most dashing compositions and economic, sweeping movements you’ll see in a modern blockbuster, a genre that Spielberg singlehandedly created.
The craft of the film is immaculate on all fronts. John Williams’ score is transfixing, patient, brooding and wondrous as his compositions are wont to be. Adam Stockhausen and Paul Tazewell’s production and costume design are stellar, Sarah Broshar steps up to the plate as sole editor for the first time on one of Spielberg’s films and crushes it, and of course Janusz Kamiński’s 21st collaboration with Spielberg as cinematographer is gorgeous and his way with pooling light is heavenly here. All of this is a given. What distinguishes Disclosure Day not just from 2026’s crop of studio films, but from Spielberg’s entire oeuvre, is what’s preoccupying him. On the cusp of his 80th year, Spielberg is asking: What’s next? What is after?
Disclosure Day is almost as much of a Rosetta Stone for understanding this man’s fascination with what’s out of our reach as his highly auto-biographical 2022 masterpiece The Fabelmans was for informing his past. Functioning like a funhouse looking glass for his entire filmography, Disclosure Day illuminates a man grappling with gifts that he still may not understand and what it means to not know his – or our – place in the world. A fixation with faith permeates the story, conceived of by Spielberg and expanded upon by Koepp, and charts its course through the whole film. The man seems restless and a bit disturbed by his lack of knowledge around what is beyond our immediate understanding of life. Blankenship, a former novitiate, is plagued by these revelations, what they mean for the world and what unsettling that limited understanding will do to an already precarious planet. Fairchild’s mysterious connection with Keller and this conspiracy incites a crisis within her, one that Blunt makes a true meal of in a best-ever performance. These two women’s respective crises of faith, reality and self reflect the galvanizing core of the movie.
Disclosure Day is born from a master of his craft looking at the state of the world, submerged in geopolitical, social, domestic chaos and pleading for kindness. Not dissimilarly to peer Francis Ford Coppola’s 2024 gonzo mess of Megalopolis, there’s something wholly touching about an elder statesman of the industry, in this case the most successful who ever lived, looking around and, instead of trying to make sense of the chaos and of the unknown, interrogating what it would mean for us to – shhh – listen. You could say it follows James Gunn’s recent Superman or Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Project Hail Mary in espousing what the chronically online dub as hopecore, but those films are more inspired by this man’s work than anything and the similarities come down to a central hope many of us have right now: for things to simply be better. While naive, even foolish, it’s still a compelling starting place and when taken in the hands of Spielberg, whose obsession with the extraterrestrial and with the mysteries of human nature have blended into one, it just works.
Comparisons to Alan Moore’s cynical Watchmen are inevitable, especially given the film’s destination, but Spielberg can’t get that cynical, he can’t help himself. This is a plea to reject the forces that divide, to embrace what binds. Compelled by making the pictures move, he’s made an unfathomably successful career by making sense of the senseless and trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. It’s why Close Encounters of the Third Kind is timeless and why Amistad (1997) falters. These patterns repeat in his filmography, where the fantastic and unimaginable are rendered with awe and bombast, while the real and the tragic can come off cloying or insensitive. In a colossally scaled hodgepodge of the two, Disclosure Day stumbles here and there with some wildly broad strokes, but no matter, the images are compelling and the heart is pounding. He’s a sentimentalist!
Spielberg often tells a story of his father waking him and his siblings up in the middle of the night in a haze to go see the Perseid meteor shower. He pinpoints it as the moment he started looking to the stars, wondering about what else may be out there. You can feel that wonder through Disclosure Day in both small moments and sweeping set pieces, within close-ups on the ensemble and within adrenaline-pumping car chases. It’s hard not to mythologize the man who made Jaws (1975), who brought Indiana Jones to life, who made dinosaurs walk the earth again, whose films inspire generation after generation.
Fairchild declares, late into the film, “I will not be your religion.” Is he speaking to these generations? If you want to be cynical, it’s a compelling read. However, this movie is anything but. It’s an olive branch in the form of a $200 million summer tentpole. It’s a guy reclaiming his title as the king of the blockbuster from those anonymous franchises iterating upon themselves until doomsday and Doomsday. More than this, it’s an old artist making a plea. That this plea is dressed up inside one of the most exciting summer adventures in ages certainly doesn’t hurt. It’s a rollicking time at the movies, one I’ll revisit with a smile; the action is a delight, the mystery is alluring, but more than anything, it touches a raw nerve both timeless and never more exposed than in 2026. Someone will see this movie and understand why they love the movies.
Disclosure Day opens in theaters everywhere June 12.
-August
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