Steven Spielberg’s latest blockbuster, Disclosure Day (2026), asks one of humanity’s biggest questions and surrounds it with strong performances from Josh O’Connor, Emily Blunt, Eve Hewson, Colin Firth and Colman Domingo. It boasts spectacular visuals, and classic blockbuster energy, but it’s far more interested in chasing a mystery than exploring what alien contact would actually mean for us.
Disclosure Day begins when Daniel (Josh O’Connor), who works for a secretive organization, steals years worth of concealed evidence of alien contact along with an advanced technological device and goes on the run. Determined to reveal these secrets, he is relentlessly pursued by government forces. Along the way, he crosses paths with Margaret (Emily Blunt), a weather presenter whose supernatural abilities suddenly awaken.
As they flee from the mysterious men chasing them, they struggle to share the truth with the world. The film follows their fight to bring this secret to the public. However, based on the trailer, it seemed as though the story would focus more on how humanity would react to such a monumental revelation once it was finally disclosed.
Would you be mad at me if I told you that Zack Snyder’s 2013 film Man of Steel does a better job of depicting humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrials than the entirety of Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day? Please don’t be. Because if anyone has the right to be mad, it’s me.
The marketing campaign for this film, which unfolded alongside Trump’s fake UFO disclosures, built up such enormous expectations in my mind that I ended up so disappointed by what I got, that I seriously felt like launching myself into space with a catapult and looking for those damn aliens on my own.
This film had one job: to show how humanity, collectively, would react to the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization. Let’s be honest, we all wonder about that. The question of whether we are alone in the universe is one of the greatest questions humanity has been chasing for thousands of years. If there are only a handful of directors capable of meeting that expectation, Spielberg is undoubtedly one of them. Instead, what we get is little more than a version of The Da Vinci Code with slightly better action sequences.
I’m making that comparison deliberately, by the way. Both films revolve around a mystery that has the potential to fundamentally shake humanity’s belief systems. I think a Pentagon official recently claimed that he had met with several religious leaders and warned them that disclosures affecting religious beliefs on a massive scale could be coming soon. But much like those claims, the film’s grand mystery ultimately turns into one giant balloon full of hot air.
I don’t know. In 2026, after decades of both great and terrible science-fiction stories, trying to fool audiences with Chariots of the Gods?-style conspiracy theories feels painfully outdated to me. Personally, I find the idea that the existence of aliens would somehow prove that God does not exist problematic from the outset. Simply assuming that these two ideas are inherently incompatible is already a rather shallow way of looking at things.
In the film, Daniel’s nun girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) fears that the truth about to emerge will leave people hopeless and cause their moral and religious systems to collapse. Oh, please. We are living in an era where people are obsessed with horoscopes, astrology, fortune-telling, tarot cards, and the notion of sending messages to the universe. People are perfectly capable of embracing beliefs that require even more blind faith than the traditional religious systems. The human mind is so creative when it comes to producing meaning that when one belief system collapses, replacing it with another rarely takes very long at all.
What I’m trying to say is this: stop insulting people’s intelligence with these cheap marketing campaigns built around “the revelation that will shake your belief systems to their core!” I get it. If making money is your only concern, then fine—keep your mouth shut and take the last dollar out of my pocket too, damn it.
In short, I wish the film had abandoned all of these artificial mystery elements and shown us something more realistic and more interesting about humanity’s contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. All the energy spent on action scenes and chase sequences could have been used to explore the psychological, political, and social reactions humanity would have. But the film never does that.
What it does instead is generate a lot of noise. It takes a powerful idea like the one in Arrival, where learning the aliens’ language fundamentally alters human perception and our understanding of time, and replaces it with a far more ordinary ability: reading people’s thoughts and life stories. Then it wraps all of that in an aura of mystery.
But I wasn’t interested in who the aliens were. I wanted to see what humanity would become in response to their existence. Instead of asking that question, Disclosure Day treats the answer as irrelevant from the very beginning and spends the rest of its runtime pretending there is a mystery worth solving.
That said, I’m not going to call this a bad film simply because it failed to meet my expectations and annoyed me. Once I set all those frustrations aside, what remains is a perfectly entertaining movie one that keeps you engaged and rarely feels boring over the course of its two-hour runtime.
The action sequences are energetic and, in many ways, the film’s strongest asset. Josh O’Connor and Emily Blunt make for a terrific on-screen pairing. Spielberg’s longtime cinematographer Janusz Kamiński delivers his usual flawless work. The film is packed with visual effects that are, at times, genuinely jaw-dropping, and of course, the score bears the unmistakable signature of John Williams.
When you put all of that together, what you get is a flawed but enjoyable summer blockbuster. The problem is that the film is content with asking one of humanity’s greatest questions, yet seems remarkably uninterested in pursuing the answer.
Check out Our Top Five Spielberg Films here.
That concludes our review of Disclosure Day
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