Disclosure Day (2026)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Disclosure Day (2026) – S. Spielberg

I’m looking back at the Disclosure Day poster now – the one with Emily Blunt’s blue eye in the centre.  You can see her eye has some unusual aster-like pattern in it.  Only on second glance did I notice that her eye and parts of her face are framed by the outline of a bird, presumably a cardinal.  Cardinals do have some symbolic meaning, having to do with a message from a lost loved one or perhaps hope in hard times or even Christian references to the blood of Jesus.  There are some nuns in this film but I’m not sure that’s the link (or is it? There’s some baked-on theology here, questioning whether the presence of life out there means God doesn’t love only us or maybe doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t take).  Perhaps the cardinal is bringing a message from Spielberg’s own past – specifically, a reminder of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).  In many ways, Disclosure Day feels like a sequel or replay of that earlier film, where Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon are incomprehensibly drawn to Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, just in time for an alien spacecraft to land (and take Dreyfuss inside – oops, spoiler). In this film, Josh O’Connor and Blunt instead are mysteriously and incomprehensibly drawn to each other (and then to a television studio), in the same way.  Maybe it isn’t that far from Escape from Witch Mountain (1975) where kids with supernatural powers are chased by Donald Pleasance and evil millionaire Ray Milland.  Here, evil corporate mastermind Colin Firth is trying to stop O’Connor and Blunt, particularly O’Connor who is poised to release evidence that the government has been suppressing knowledge of extraterrestrial life (and that crash landing in Roswell, New Mexico).  We see some of the video that he shows his girlfriend, Jane.  It looks just like you would think (if you ever watched an alien autopsy video). Firth also has an alien device that allows him to mind-meld with people, if he can see their social media accounts. I started to get some faint echoes of De Palma’s The Fury (1978) here and there. But whereas De Palma never was afraid of going freaky, Spielberg keeps his masterful control even though the plot itself feels pretty schlocky. He is good at directing the action scenes – at times it feels as though the movie is one long car chase -- and there’s even a Jackie Chan-styled leap from a car to a train too.  The lead characters make some inexplicable choices though – or really their choices are being guided by, uh, aliens. (Most other characters don’t really have much to do).  Are aliens the Macguffin here? Knowing that Spielberg and writer David Koepp started with the ending (and that youtube clip where the air force flyers see something inexplicable buzz them) and then moved backwards trying to figure out a plot that gets you there tells you a lot about this film.