Spoiler Space offers thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot points we can’t disclose in our official review. Fair warning: This article features plot details of Disclosure Day.
At the end of Disclosure Day‘s first act, director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp confirm the ominous, seismic stakes of their sci-fi conspiracy film. Whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) has escaped the custody of his former clandestine employer Wardex and holed up in a middle America farmhouse. There, he shows his ex-nun girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) the truth that’s out there: Archival evidence not only of first contact between Americans and extraterrestrials, but alien cadavers locked up in morgues and footage of living specimens being tortured. Some otherworldly influence is already afoot—we’ve just seen weather reporter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) spontaneously and manically showcase psychic and xenolinguistic powers during an ordinary workday—but Daniel’s secret stash of flash drives is the tipping point leading to the planned unveiling of this alien material to the world: Disclosure Day.
It’s a big moment, but two interconnected problems immediately arise. First, the digital tinkering and modern CGI in the “archive” footage is obvious, and while Spielberg’s trend of embracing the slick fluidity of VFX physics has opened his 21st-century filmmaking in cool and strange ways, it leads to footage that’s not shocking or convincing enough to get on board with the film’s stakes—it doesn’t read as authentic enough to not question. This triggers the second problem, as none of the characters in possession of the footage—not Daniel, Jane, nor their zealous corporate pursuer Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth)—make the argument we all expect them to vocalize: Why are they all so confident that the global population will simultaneously believe this footage is not fake, doctored, or a cynical political ploy?
Disclosure Day neither addresses nor resolves these issues, and they sit at the foreground of the film’s climactic disclosure, straining against the trembling anticipatory power that Spielberg builds throughout the second half. After slipping away from Wardex agents, nothing—not newstation sabotage nor baffled producers—can stop Margaret from delivering the climactic news broadcast, which will share clips from 70 years worth of cover-ups. The final sequence is a startling montage of alien encounters: UFOs cresting clouds, soldiers ushering around tiny Close Encounters aliens, and clinical creature examinations.
The sequence has a blunt but slippery magic to it, in no small part because you are constantly afraid of it collapsing in on itself, that it will show us something too ridiculous or earnest to swallow. The film’s tight focus on three or four human characters suddenly expands to countless everyday onlookers, telegraphing to the audience how they also ought to be responding. Their unified shocked and attentive reactions feel bluntly instructional and therefore easy to reject. The footage is still impactful. Some shots of gasping, bleeding gray aliens and geometrically impossible spacecraft, coolly observed by military cameras, are stark and overwhelming. But their power always feels cinematic; the idea that this is instinctively, unquestionably real is hokey.
The fragility of Spielberg’s return to aliens is rooted in this earnest sincerity. Disclosure Day is not a post-truth film. It firmly believes that the clarity of the footage would cause the world (including the soldiers preparing for a vague World War III-inciting conflict in the background) to stand still and unite in newborn humanism. This is probably why little time is spent debating the merits of blowing the whistle on alien contact, and the few scenes where characters (mostly Scanlon and Wakefield) go back and forth on its necessity feel perfunctory, with Spielberg and Koepp’s interest lying elsewhere. In reality, everyone who watches Wardex’s footage would not be equally convinced of its authenticity. This is how Spielberg’s first contemporary film since 2005 feels out of touch—it’s baffling to watch a conspiracy thriller where an opposing theory is never seriously considered, where nobody thinks that videos of humans meeting, torturing, and cataloguing aliens might be a psyop. Even though Wardex’s footage does show real events, shouldn’t Scanlon be comfortable knowing that the majority of the people watching will assume they’re fake?
Spielberg has voiced caution around using GenAI in filmmaking, so he’s well aware of its deceitful image-making potential. Disclosure Day only includes one glib reference to AI in a television control room, but there’s a broader omission in its mic-drop broadcast: Our overwhelming modern access to information has made some people as gullible as it’s made others skeptical, a division that forms the foundation of the “post-truth” era’s cultural psychosis. Disclosure Day‘s ending attempts to reject this divided, fatalistic mentality without acknowledging it even exists.
Yet, shaky though it is, Disclosure Day‘s ending is effective and stirring, and not just because of Spielberg’s awestruck close-ups or the best John Williams score in years. It’s because the film views first contact as a head-on collision between the material and the spiritual. The awakening of Margaret’s linguistic and empathic powers makes her a quasi-Biblical herald, and with each kind insight into the internal troubles of strangers, co-workers, and Wardex pursuers, Spielberg and Koepp build her Messianic presence, both Christlike and John The Baptist-coded. She and Daniel’s recalled childhood memories of being abducted have all the serenity and danger of an angelic visitation. Spielberg favors the spiritual transformation one has upon discovering aliens are already among us over the rational worth of the evidence itself.
Even though there is a tension to how the characters and the audience respond to the footage, Spielberg will not consider Disclosure Day as anything other than a victory for faith in the irrational—if he is aware that some audiences will find it implausible or ludicrous, he is willing to leave them behind. Even though the finale imagines Disclosure Day in realistic, traditional media terms—a news broadcast, a montage of video, a live in-studio “interview” between an alien (“In Vivo 17”) and its human heralds—its success hinges on the audience accepting the scene as an encounter with the sublime. It’s all charged with an anxiety that the magic spell of first contact will break as the story folds in more realistic structures and reference points.
Disclosure Day calls to mind an earlier Spielberg sci-fi finale—not his other alien films, but A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, which concludes with a devastating epilogue reuniting the android child with his long-dead human mother in a computer simulation. Like Margaret and Daniel’s abduction, it is as Freudian as it is fairytale; like Disclosure Day, its sincerity and sentimentality disguise just how spiritual the sci-fi story is getting. Hindsight has proven A.I.‘s ending as one of Spielberg’s best, but that’s partially due to how hermetic its reality is. Cutting to Disclosure Day‘s spectators is practically instructing the audience on how to react, giving us ample opportunity to debate and reject its fragile balance of real-world stakes and transcendent communion. The finale’s rich current of spiritualism is its greatest weapon and weakness. It wants to take us all the way to the sublime, but because Spielberg also wants to keep us in the real world, we can’t help but feel uncomfortably grounded.
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