Disclosure Day Finally Gets Its Proof, and Loses Its Nerve
Steven Spielberg delivers the alien movie he has spent five decades building toward, thrilling and tender for most of its running time, until the final stretch turns his lifelong wonder into a lecture.
By MIGUEL MATEO | JUNE 12, 2026
I have loved Steven Spielberg for as long as I have loved movies, and I say that as someone who tries not to say it lightly. But loving a filmmaker this thoroughly means knowing his failure modes as well as his gifts, and I do not love every one of his films. He has been accused for years of emotional manipulation, of reaching for sentiment when a scene has not earned it, and I have often found that critique overstated, a lazy shorthand people reach for instead of engaging with what he is actually doing. With Disclosure Day, though, I think the critique lands. Not for most of the film, which earns its awe honestly, but in the final minutes, when Spielberg stops trusting the story he has told and starts telling us what to feel about it.
The setup is vintage Spielberg by way of a modern conspiracy thriller. Josh O'Connor's Daniel Kellner, a Wardex cybersecurity expert turned whistleblower, and Emily Blunt's Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist whose on-air breakdown turns out to be something closer to an awakening, are pulled toward each other and toward a truth that Colin Firth's Noah Scanlon has spent his career burying. For two hours this mostly works as pure momentum, chase after chase, revelation after revelation, propelled by Janusz Kaminski's restless camera and John Williams doing what John Williams does. It is the most fun I have had at a Spielberg movie in years.
It is also proof he still has the eye. There is a scene late in the film where Hugo, played with real warmth by Colman Domingo, has rebuilt Margaret's childhood home down to the last detail, and the reveal of that snow-covered cabin where she and Daniel were taken as children carries the same hushed, unnerving wonder that made Close Encounters and E.T. work in the first place. And the train sequence, a car dragged down the tracks into an oncoming freight train, is the rare modern set piece that still feels handmade and dangerous rather than assembled in a computer. Both scenes are reminders of why, even at nearly eighty, Spielberg remains one of the best storytellers this industry has ever produced.
Which is exactly why the film's central reveal disappointed me. Nobody has built tension around a delayed reveal better than Spielberg. He made us wait for the shark in Jaws and the T. rex in Jurassic Park, and when he finally showed us, it was worth every second of withholding. Disclosure Day spends its entire running time promising the same kind of payoff, an alien finally standing in front of us after eighty years of cover-up, and when it arrives, it is oddly inert. The buildup is masterful. The thing itself barely registers.
And then there is the ending, which is where my patience thinned. Margaret takes the alien's message to the world and closes the broadcast, and by extension the film, with a single whispered word. I understand what Spielberg and his screenwriter are going for, and I understand the word is meant to carry the weight of everything the film has been arguing about empathy and connection. But the way it is staged, all hushed reverence and world-healing catharsis, felt less like a character's private revelation and more like Spielberg himself stepping in front of the camera. After a career spent circling this subject, from Close Encounters to E.T. to War of the Worlds, it plays like he is finally allowed to say I told you so, and the film briefly stops being a movie and becomes a public service announcement.
None of that erased my enjoyment of the film, or my genuine relief at seeing Spielberg back in this genre after so long away. The cast around Blunt is solid without being especially memorable, Firth in particular given less to chew on than his top billing suggests, but Blunt herself is the reason the film holds together. She has now proven, across wildly different genres, that she can anchor a blockbuster almost by will alone, and she does it here again, carrying scenes that could have collapsed into pure spectacle without her. Disclosure Day is a flawed film from a filmmaker who has earned the right to occasionally overreach, and I walked out of it more forgiving of the overreach than frustrated by it.
TRating: ★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Now in theaters
Directed by Steven Spielberg | Written by David Koepp, story by Steven Spielberg | Starring Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo, Eve Hewson