Disclosure Day Review
Disclosure Day (2026) Film Review, a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, written by David Koepp and Steven Spielberg and starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, Wyatt Russell, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Elizabeth Marvel, Hettienne Park, Tommy Martinez, Gabby Beans, Jeremy Shamos, Brandon Wilson, Priyanka Kedia, Lora Lee Gayer, Lance Archer, Chavo Guerrero Jr. and Brian Cage.
Director Steven Spielberg’s ambitious new science fiction movie, Disclosure Day, is a fusion of elements found in other movies made throughout the career of the legendary filmmaker. There are bits of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and AI: Artificial Intelligence, to name just a few. And if you need to see one of the film’s heroes walking through the woods, following animals, or hanging between two moving trains, this movie provides such scenarios for good measure. Disclosure Day is a bit overlong but is still a satisfactory look at the possibilities that await us regarding extra-terrestrial life in the universe.
As the film opens, we meet a man named Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor). He’s at a wrestling match and has to drop a bag down to the ground as he stands up to cheer with the crowd. Apparently, he is in way over his head, and the audience begins to slowly piece together the details of his unusual situation. A bit later on, a weather newscaster, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), seems to have special powers as she is pulled over by a cop on her way to work and gets out of a ticket by revealing personal aspects of the officer’s life. Daniel and Margaret are our two main characters for the duration of the film save for Colin Firth’s Noah Scanlon. Firth’s character leads Wardex, a government sponsored company which has suppressed information that is about to come into full view whether the world is ready for it or not.
Colman Domingo plays Hugo Wakefield, a man who has information that Margaret may hold the key to secrets regarding alien life in the world. Also on board are Margaret’s significant other, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), and Daniel’s close female companion, Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), who turns out to be a former nun. All these characters merge into the storyline when Margaret goes on television and starts speaking in a secret language that only people like Daniel can understand. Why is Daniel able to interpret what almost nobody else can? There’s your surprise twist within the film as plot details get heavily revealed the more the plot kicks in.
Disclosure Day has many unnecessary scenes. Margaret tries to have Jackson run over her cell phone with his car a couple of times to keep the authorities off their tails in a sequence that feels destined to have remained on the cutting room floor. This film spends too much time on Jane’s past even though there’s the intriguing character of Sister Maura, who’s played quite well by Elizabeth Marvel and helps the movie save face.
There are also extended chase sequences that have Daniel and Margaret on the run from Firth’s Noah. One of these scenes has Margaret sandwiched between a couple of moving trains and that feels like overkill in a movie centered on extra-terrestrial life. Simultaneously, the movie keeps its plot details secret for way too long, revealing a bit of information and then waiting a while to give the audience the full picture regarding what’s going on until much later in the film. Watching this movie is like putting a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle together. It’s almost as frustrating at times, too.
Luckily, the movie finds its footing in the second part of it. Blunt holds the movie together with her energetic performance which is full of subtext. There are a lot of similarities to the work of M. Night Shyamalan here between scenes that feel like they belong in either Signs or The Sixth Sense. Blunt’s Margaret goes ahead and talks to characters about their lives as if she’s Haley Joel Osment from The Sixth Sense. Similarities to Signs are so clear that pretty much anyone can decipher them while watching the film.
Unfortunately, the premise of Disclosure Day regarding government agencies keeping secrets about alien life from the public feels more plausible than science fiction. Many of the scenes at the end are really intriguing as the movie starts to reveal its wild cards about the past and the previous alien visits which have occurred throughout the years.
There are some good performances here. Josh O’Connor isn’t the first name one would think of for this often rather straightforward role, but the actor handles his scenes opposite Blunt extremely well. Side characters like Domingo’s feel like they’re just here to pad out the movie to run well over two hours in length. Hewson and Russell service the film well with characters that feel a bit unnecessary but are nevertheless acceptable in the context of the film. Firth overacts a bit although it’s nice to see him working again in this capacity.
What Disclosure Day does right is preserve the integrity of the science fiction event film. This is a movie for a new generation of movie-goers to discover the magic of Spielberg’s previous (and, arguably, better) movies. Spielberg gets the magic of the premise down to a science right towards the ending and the last twenty-five minutes of the film are mysterious and spellbinding to behold without giving away any major spoilers.
Disclosure Day proves Spielberg is a master at helming films about alien life whether every scene works in this new movie or not. John Williams’ otherworldly score is quite breathtaking to listen to and gives the film a touch of magic when it really needs it. Blunt is the film’s MVP as she proves that her powerful work in The Smashing Machine was no fluke. She does ordinary characters just as well as she can play Mary Poppins and her character in Disclosure Day is between extraordinary and average with just the right level of intelligence when she’s not revealing every single detail about a character’s personal life.
While Disclosure Day could have bypassed some minor characters and plot threads, it’s a worthy addition to Spielberg’s impressive body of work. Spielberg knows how to hold an audience’s attention even if he’s not as razor sharp with some of the material as he may have been when he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Disclosure Day promises to make viewers question what other life forms exist out there and how much of a right we have to know about them. It’s a good film.
Rating: 7.5/10
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