Disclosure Day Delivers Spielbergian Wonder and Heart

“I stole what I was paid to protect. People have a right to the truth.”

Disclosure Day is a good film with a great cast doing excellent work. Steven Spielberg once again teams with frequent collaborator, the composer John Williams and once again, the result is movie magic. This is an unusual action movie that stresses the need for communication over conflict. A surprising, touching, thought-provoking picture that epitomizes the concept that comedian Craig Ferguson coined in 2010 as “the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.”

“I’m not a traitor, and they’re not the Government.”

Disclosure Day is a 2026 Universal Pictures/ Amblin Entertainment film directed by Steven Spielberg from a story by Spielberg and a screenplay by David Koepp. The picture stars Emily Blunt, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo, Wyatt Russell, Eve Hewson and Josh O’Connor.

“The thing that’s wrong with you is that you think there’s something wrong with me.”

Since the 1947 Roswell Event in New Mexico, the WARDEX Private Military Corporation has maintained operational secrecy and the fiction that humans are alone as the only intelligent life in the universe. Many other incidents have taken place over the years, and WARDEX has kept a lid on all of it while reverse-engineering the alien technology.

It is 2026. The world stands on the cusp of global war. Troops are being called up and mobilizing everywhere. The current CEO of WARDEX, Noah Scanlon (Firth), has been made aware that thirty of his top team leaders are missing. Worse, his best Cybersecurity Expert, Daniel Kellner (O’Connor) has gone on the lam with 79 years’ worth of video evidence as well as with one of the only three functioning, hand-held, alien devices. He sends a response team to track Kellner down.

The mundane morning routine of KCXE meteorologist Maggie Fairchild (Blunt) is broken when a crimson Northern Cardinal hops into her kitchen and the little, red bird locks eyes with the television personality. As if a switch was thrown in her brain, suddenly Fairchild’s mental faculties increase by leaps and bounds. The bird flitters away. Maggie instantly displays fluencies in any foreign language she comes across, speaking Russian to her boyfriend, Jackson (Russell), without realizing it. Displaying knowledge she has no excuse having, she talks her way out of a traffic ticket. At work, she blows the local weather report by speaking gibberish. The guttural clicks and pops emanating from the blonde weather-lady’s mouth shock her staff and she’s swiftly pulled from off the air, but not before the clip goes viral. She’s flagged by a WARDEX computer bot, Scanlon is notified, and he sends another team to pick her up.

Jane Blankenship (Hewson), a Nun who has not completed her Story nor taken her Perpetual Vows, has gone rogue with Kellner, who she has been dating. Now that she knows the truth, she’s struggling with the theological implications and can’t think of anyplace else to go so she takes Daniel and returns to St. Clare of the Dawn, the Monastery where she was training.

The missing WARDEX staff and scientists have created a resistance group headed by Hugo Wakefield (Domingo), Scanlon’s former partner at WARDEX, who had a change of heart after his wife died and who is pushing to disclose all the information the WARDEX computers have on the aliens. He sends his Chief of Security, Santiago, to extract Daniel and Jane.

Using the sole alien artifact, Scanlon is able to reach into Jane’s mind, learning where they’re hiding. His goons arrive and put the bag on O’Connor, but Jane gives them the slip, and she’s holding the flash drives along with the alien device.

After reading Jackson’s mind, Maggie gets a bad vibe and bugs out. Once on the road, she begins to sense Daniel’s thoughts and perceive O’Connor’s presence. Maggie turns her car around and makes a beeline for him, heading straight into the lion’s den.

Can Maggie make her way into a heavily guarded, locked-down, secret facility and rescue Daniel? Will O’Connor be able to transmit his message to the world? Can Scanlon keep his secret under wraps? Please see Disclosure Day to find out.

“Is this a memory or a dream?”

“I don’t remember anymore.”

Disclosure Day is a flat film with a cold and muted color palette. The various locations, subbing for safe-houses and Kansas City, MO, feel frayed, comfortable, and lived-in, making a nice contrast with the high-tech WARDEX headquarters and the KCXE broadcast studio.

Despite the actions of certain characters, Disclosure Day presents empathy as mankind’s foremost evolutionary advantage. As a corollary to that, the aliens telepathically present as cute forest animals to mollify humans. During the movie’s watershed moment, that advantage is challenged and put on foremost display.

Humanity learning that they are not alone in the universe, while also on the brink of a metastasizing, global conflict, is a plot that Hollywood loves to repeatedly return to. In the 1951 Robert Wise-directed, Sci-fi classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still, the alien Klaatu and his robot companion, Gort, arrive in Washington, DC. to end the atomic arms race and the burgeoning Cold War. The impetus of the plot for the long-running Anime franchise known as Super-Dimensional Fortress Macross, which first aired in 1982 and is known in the West as Robotech, is the cataclysmic crash-landing of an immense, heavily armed and armored alien battleship. The awesome impact abruptly ends a brutal World War as the rival nations realize that the real threat is coming at them from above. In both James Cameron’s 1989 underwater epic, The Abyss, as well as Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 banger, Pacific Rim, the danger comes from the frigid depths of the oceans. In Zach Snyder’s 2009 live-action adaptation of Watchmen, worldwide hostilities cease and the former foes during the Cold War unite to fight the perceived threat of Doctor Manhattan. The source material, written by Alan Moore and published in 1986, has the ultimate threat to the world appear to be extra-terrestrial in nature.

The WARDEX Corporation is a Non-Government Organization (NGO) and a Private Military Corporation (PMC) at the same time. If they’re not based in Kansas City, MO, they’re certainly able to draw from local DHS because they have a lot of guys under arms.

In his notes, this reviewer repeatedly mistook Blunt’s character, Maggie Fairchild, with the former star of soaps and screen from the eighties, Morgan Fairchild.

The part of the picture where Scanlon interrogates Jane is a slog. It’s like trudging through mud. Three-quarters of the scene could be trimmed to better narrative effect while enhancing the overall pacing of the picture.

Though this reviewer could not detect a Wilhelm Scream during Disclosure Day’s runtime, there is a good car chase that cuts off right before it teeters into a Blues Brothers-esque parody. There’s also a terrific example of Spielberg’s love of abrupt cliffs with sheer drops just materializing in middle of an action sequence that he has used to great effect in several of his films. John Williams’ score is excellent throughout, but even more effective during the various chases.

The idea that the aliens’ plan for escape relies on a random local weather lady and a bunch of conscience-laden, disgruntled employees certainly bespeaks of the desperate nature of their cause and the depraved conditions of their captivity. If the plan is anything, it’s a Hail Mary, which makes Daniel’s relationship with Jane the rogue Nun quite fitting.

Jane is experiencing a theological crisis: She is suddenly, stunningly aware of the presence of extra-terrestrial life; is God? Of course, he must be, dude is God. All-mighty, all-knowing, that sort of thing. Does that mean that God’s love encompasses other life beyond humans? Does that mean humans aren’t unique in the eyes of God?

While Maggie develops a broad range of psychic powers as well as complete understanding of the aliens’ technology, they give Daniel control of math, what Wakefield calls the language the Book of the Universe is composed of.

An adage by the famed British Science Fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, states that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Maggie’s mental mastery, prodigious psychic powers, and her intuitive understanding of the featureless, shard-like, extraterrestrial technology reads like sorcery. It’s quite enchanting. She is able to both read a person’s past in an instant and project an image in their mind’s eye that is identical to their loved ones. It is literally an illusion, a glamour of old.

In a clever touch, the WARDEX rebels, led by Santiago, use firetrucks to get around because no one pays any attention to the loud and ubiquitous vehicles beyond just getting out of the way.

The idea that not just one but many alien vessels have crash-landed on Earth in 79 years and the Earth is still here as a life-bearing orb and not a cracked and blasted wasteland doesn’t fly. There’s an inherent contradiction. The so-advanced-that-they’re-magic vessels repeatedly fail and crash, but they’re so-advanced-that-they’re-magic that they’re not bound by physics or the law of conservation of energy. A ship with a potent enough energy source that allows for high-speed, round-trip, interstellar travel would detonate upon impact, releasing all that energy in an instant and potentially splitting the planet’s crust.

The climax and denouement of Disclosure Day is cathartic. Maggie and Dan are likeable and sympathetic characters that a viewer will want to see succeed. This is the third time denizens of outer space in a Spielberg movie have been depicted as lithe, big-eyed, grey aliens after 1977’s Close Encounters of a Third Kind and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008. By leaps and bounds, Disclosure Day is a better film than the fourth Indiana Jones movie.

Disclosure Day is in theatres on June 12th.