Disclosure Day

DISCLOSURE DAY   ***

Steven Spielberg

2026

IDEA:  With the world on the brink of geopolitical catastrophe, a cybersecurity expert and a TV weatherwoman are involved in a plot to publicly reveal the existence of extraterrestrial life.

BLURB:  Disclosure Day starts as a paranoid conspiracy thriller and ends as an irony-free, self-reflexive paean to the power of movies to foster awe, empathy, and unity. Perhaps only a filmmaker as titanically venerable as Spielberg could get away with implicitly positing himself, and his work, as channels for the communication of a higher power (art), the same way Emily Blunt’s Margaret Fairchild becomes an empathic vessel through which the extraterrestrials appeal to humankind’s better nature. Spielberg’s cinema has always been one rooted in primal pleasures and fears, connecting us to our most easily dazzled (and vulnerable) selves, and in Disclosure Day he makes a studio-set replica of Fairchild’s old family home serve as a madeleine-trigger to awaken her buried childhood memories. What could be a more perfect metaphor for Spielberg’s films, fastidiously constructed simulacra that bring us back to our own primal scenes? Spielberg and Koepp expand the metaphor as the film progresses, linking aliens and the stories told by moving images as figures of a collective faith that could, ideally, change human consciousness for the better. Disclosure Day’s earnest belief in this possibility — achieved via legacy media, no less — feels admittedly at odds with our increasingly atomized, factious society. Such guileless optimism is not exactly helped by being grafted to some very dubious plotting and character writing. But goofy and implausible are par for the invariably fun Spielberg genre course, as is schmaltzy humanism. Despite its messiness, Disclosure Day is still the expertly shot, edited, and acted work of a master, full of Kamiński’s dynamic, pirouetting camerawork and invigorated, especially, by Blunt’s alternately vivacious and tense, funny, polyglot performance as a possessed woman who persists even when she has no idea what she’s doing, or why. She’s all of us, beckoned alike by the terrifying unknowns of life and the transformative potential of stories to soothe them. If it’s hard to fully believe in the film’s message of hope, Spielberg seems to be entreating us: try.