Review: 'Disclosure Day,' Spielberg's latest alien adventure, lands with thud
Steven Spielberg returns to alien territory in "Disclosure Day," a busy, wide-eyed and ultimately unsatisfying sci-fi blockbuster that shows the "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "War of the Worlds" director has spent a little too much time staring up at the sky.
This overstuffed but undercooked tale of extraterrestrials isn't so much about the existence of other forms of life as much as it is about the efforts by big government to keep that evidence a secret.
But before you start thinking Spielberg is dealing with the hard reality of those beings and the suppression of said evidence, you should know that a key plot device in "Disclosure Day" is a candy bar-sized object, referred to at one point as a "thingy," which allows its users both the powers of mind control over others and invisibility. We're a cloak away from being in "Harry Potter" territory.
The "thingy" and its powers are much more central to the action than the titular day of disclosure, and in terms of explanations, "Obsession's" One Wish Willow is more rooted in reality than this all-powerful MacGuffin.
"Challengers'" Josh O'Connor is Daniel Kellner, a whistleblower who carries roughly 40 unlabeled hard drives of alien evidence in a backpack on his person. (Could he consolidate those hard drives onto a single device? I don't know, I'm not a tech guy, but it seems like there's a better way.)
He's on the run from Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), who leads a team of shadowy government bad guys who are out to steal the backpack and keep Daniel's information from going public.
Daniel was a loyal government soldier until he wasn't, and now he's on the run along with Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson, daughter of U2's Bono), an ex-nun who is used to bring explorations of religion into the story. And "Disclosure Day" has a lot of exploration of religion, and where it fits into and/or disrupts ideas that we're not alone in this vast universe of ours.
A separate storyline picks up with Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a TV weatherperson in Kansas City who lives with her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) and is thinking about moving on to a new market. One morning Margaret suddenly starts speaking Russian, is pulled over while blasting Gwen Stefani's "The Sweet Escape" in her car at irresponsible levels, and convinces a cop to let her go. When she gets to her station and goes on air, she starts speaking in clicks, and suddenly collapses on the stage at her TV studio.
It's a thrilling sequence, and Spielberg stages several of them throughout "Disclosure Day," as he and screenwriter David Koepp, working from a story by Spielberg (the two are longtime collaborators, going back to "Jurassic Park"), aim to bring Daniel and Margaret together and unite them with Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), an ex-government agent in favor of disclosing the alien files. Spielberg has enough control over his vision and technical know-how to shoot circles around his action sequences, and from a pure technical standpoint, his sweeping camera movements are often dazzling.
He creates enough intrigue through sheer ingenuity to carry the film for longer than most would be able to get away with. But as "Disclosure Day's" questions and incongruities pile up, the structure's foundational weaknesses become apparent.
There are major questions over the capabilities, let alone the origins, of the "thingy." There are several instances where characters are able to sneak away from government agents who are mere feet away but just don't cross their field of vision. And that's to say nothing of the eventual reveal of the aliens, which look like every Roswell sketch of little rubber people we've seen in science fiction since the 1950s.
Spielberg turns 80 later this year, and there's no escaping his outwardly boomer approach to the material. Late in the movie, it's the power of television news that disseminates the information we've long been waiting for, and we focus on the awed faces of large groups of people (it's the classic Spielberg Face) as they get their news from their flickering screens. It's a wonder he didn't correlate the moment with the Beatles playing on Ed Sullivan.
Spielberg has long been one of cinema's biggest dreamers, wowed by other worlds and the mysteries within, and how those may collide with life here on Earth. Here, he seems much more concerned with the role of religion in discovery than in films past, and what other forms of life might mean for the grounding of our belief systems. Unfortunately it's too much for a film that is already wobbly in its focus and execution to get a handle on.
There are some car chases and a train sequence that, on their own, offer thrills, but "Disclosure Day" deflates as it moves forward, and the ultimate reveal - which, as it unfolds, becomes oddly fixated on directorial choices in network television newsrooms - lands with a deafening thud.
Spielberg has clearly been thinking about a lot of these themes and ideas for years, if not his whole lifetime. But he's unable to bring them together here into a cohesive whole, and his "Disclosure Day" ends up coming across as a lot of hot air.
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'DISCLOSURE DAY'
Grade: C
MPA rating: PG-13 (for action/violence, some bloody images and strong language)
Running time: 2:25
How to watch: In theaters June 12
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This story was originally published June 9, 2026 at 1:32 PM.