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Review: Disclosure Day (2026)

Disclosure Day (2026) Disclosure Day (2026)

There’s old-fashioned, and then there’s out of touch – and even Steven Spielberg, cinematic maestro (not least of first-contact alien movies), can miss the mark.

Not that he should be quoted anywhere, but any discussion of this film requires it: Elon Musk famously said that “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”. Disclosure Day is explicitly director Steven Spielberg‘s heartfelt attempt (via screenwriter David Koepp) to respond to this sentiment – something the director has managed more deftly in his previous films, and specifically within his first-contact alien classics, to which Disclosure Day certainly invites comparison.

Is it that media and misinformation have grown too unwieldy for cinema to reflect, or that Spielberg is no longer up to the task?

Wonder in the Darkness

Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) and his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) are on the run from Noah (Colin Firth) and his sinister tech firm with some stolen and incriminating material. Meanwhile, TV weather presenter Margaret (Emily Blunt, who delivers several technically astounding moments throughout this film) one day develops strange mind-reading and linguistic abilities, before going on the run herself to find out why. Both Daniel and Margaret are helped along remotely by the kindly but cryptic Hugo (Colman Domingo). There’s suspense, chases, bullets, crashes, British actors doing American accents, and discussions about faith, trauma, humanity and, yes, empathy, as they all rush to converge on a reality-changing revelation.

Unmistakeable Spielberg flourishes permeate Disclosure Day – heart-stopping action set pieces, heightened sequences of emotion and wonder, and at least one truly arresting oner (Emily Blunt’s idea, it turns out) – which almost thread the film’s various disparate elements:

But as the film struggles to satisfyingly address the myriad components thrown into its conversation, intention versus impact feels increasingly miscalibrated – especially when compared to some of the director’s previous explorations of the same subject matter.

Because Spielberg is such an entertaining blockbuster director, and because wonder is a feature of some of the best-remembered moments from his films, he is perhaps regarded as a lighter-hearted storyteller than he actually is. But even the most wondrous entries in his filmography are stories about broken families that don’t get put back together, haunted individuals who never manage to find peace or community, and the ultimate irrelevance of morality in the face of grim reality. For all the trappings of sentimentality, Spielberg’s work is actually often bleak. Which makes Disclosure Day stand out all the more in his filmography, and makes it all the more incoherent, as an earnestly hopeful appeal.

The quaint, small town settings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) act as gateways to larger, darker themes of generational trauma, suburban alienation, neurodivergence, and tyrannical government they ultimately explore. Two decades after those, Spielberg’s two sci-fi team-ups with Tom Cruise lead with their darkness. Minority Report (2002) portrays the idea of an empathy superpower as traumatising, both for the empath and in how they are dehumanized for it by corporate interest. War of the Worlds (2005) sets up its broken family drama as a neat microcosm of post-9/11 America’s struggle to band together to overcome its collective trauma, but by that film’s end it mostly abandons its thematic premise for a one-man-blows-up-all-the-aliens rah-rah finale, and an unearned and unsatisfying emotional resolution. Another two decades after those, and continuing along this trajectory,

Disclosure Day drops us straight into its mishmash of big ideas Spielberg has explored previously, yet over its runtime somehow flattens them, and shrinks both in scale and away from the darkness of our current reality upon which it purports to shine a hopeful light.

Within the last few years, humanity (certainly in the US, as is Spielberg’s focus in Disclosure Day, if not globally) has been given multiple chances, if not challenges, to respond with empathy – and each time, the empathetic are drowned out by the fearful and punished by the hateful. The argument could be made that, collectively, humanity has repeatedly not only failed, but scornfully refused, to unite in empathy. The idea that a single historic revelation could cut through that and force a global shakeup of perspectives and priorities, much less via a single legacy media broadcast, ignores so many of the things Disclosure Day purports to respond to. It doesn’t even reflect the reality that real-life disclosure day actually happened very recently and the world batted not one eye. Is it that media and misinformation have grown too unwieldy for cinema to reflect, or that Spielberg is no longer up to the task?

The Empathy Problem

Emily Blunt’s character Margaret is gifted, we’re told, with superhuman empathy. This presents as mind-reading and being multilingual. The problem with this (and this will seem incredibly nit-picky, but it’s actually kind of crucial): empathy isn’t reading someone else’s mind, or giving them advice based on having all the details of their life.

Empathy isn’t mind-reading – it’s an act of imagination,

of using a few clues to extrapolate an entire lived experience, and imagining how you might feel if it were yours. Empathy is humanising someone else without knowing everything about them, and choosing to give a stranger grace not because of what you know, but because of what you don’t know. Considering that empathy is a central concern of this film, it feels important that it get it right. Disclosure Day fundamentally missing that feels emblematic of why it doesn’t altogether work as a whole.

Musk is a hateful and deeply unremarkable man-baby, but too much of humanity acts as if it agrees with his sentiment. The question, which has been asked and answered, isn’t whether faith can co-exist with knowledge (of aliens or otherwise). People have demonstrated that even when confronted with the very evidence they claim to seek, they will stubbornly (or fearfully) continue to believe whatever they want to believe, and will construct increasingly elaborate echo chambers which allow them to remain exactly where, how, and who they already are. We live in an age where humanity is more connected than ever before – and that connectivity is weaponised to isolate, divide, and feed the rich with the poor. A story about how to address that, with or without the framing of a first-contact alien story, would have met the moment far better than Disclosure Day manages to.

Further Viewing

Spielberg Film School! Steven Spielberg explains the “science” to one of the most effective suspense scenes in Disclosure Day as the “metronome” of “a very deliberate series of cuts“:

Disclosure Day didn’t land emotionally for me – but that is absolutely no fault of the film’s MVP, Courtney Grace:

Fascinating:

The sound team’s rather lovely story about capturing audio for the piano carriage scene (clipped from the longer discussion, via Dolby):

The train sequence was thrilling, but also felt like it belonged in another movie. Anyway, the BTS is great:

I’m 100% certain I’m not the first or only person to say this, but Contact (1997) does Disclosure Day better than Disclosure Day (particularly the religion-versus-aliens thing)…

Review: Contact (1997)

… and Arrival (2016) has since reset the benchmark for first contact movies:

Review: Arrival (2016)