Margaret (Emily Blunt) in Steven Spielberg’s 'Disclosure Day'
Universal Pictures
Disclosure Day marks Steven Spielberg’s return to the UFO phenomenon, but the film feels like a relic from a simpler time.
Disclosure Day depicts the gradual unmasking of a grand conspiracy, through the perspective of alien abductees blessed with otherworldly abilities.
To some degree, the film echoes the recent release of the UFO Files, the Pentagon unveiling previously classified documents and footage featuring unknown flying objects.
For decades, Spielberg has explored the idea of alien encounters, but Disclosure Day feels oddly out of touch, more so than his older films.
The dramatic climax of Disclosure Day doesn’t reflect the reality of the modern media landscape at all, taking place in a world that no longer exists.
Spielberg’s interest in UFOs is genuine—the 79-year-old director told EW that he has long believed in the existence of aliens, and over time, became convinced that extraterrestrials have visited our planet.
"Based on a preponderance of visual evidence and testimony, I have no doubt that we have been visited by off-world species since Roswell in 1947," Spielberg said.
Spielberg helped shape the alien encounters genre with his 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which framed aliens as mysterious, highly evolved beings seeking to share secrets with humanity.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) depicted its titular alien as a benevolent botanist stranded on our hostile planet, while War of the Worlds (2005) adapts H.G. Wells’ classic alien invasion story, showing humanity ravaged by the superior weaponry of an interstellar race.
Disclosure Day echoes the tone of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg returning to the idea of aliens visiting Earth to impart otherworldly wisdom, with a heavy splash of the messianic undertones of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Disclosure Day preaches the importance of empathy and understanding, humanity’s worst impulses embodied by a sinister cover-up, framing full disclosure as a great awakening for our species.
In the film, aliens are otherworldly angels which appear as animals, guiding chosen individuals to lead humanity down a brighter path.
After crash-landing, the aliens become prisoners, enduring cruel experimentation and seeing their technology stolen for selfish ends, with the world hurtling towards WWIII.
Thanks to Margaret (Emily Blunt), the existence of alien visitors is broadcast to the public, the film’s dramatic ending seeing the truth exposed.
Unfortunately, Spielberg’s earnestness rings hollow, a cloyingly insincere depiction of the modern world.
The most bizarre part of Disclosure Day’s triumphant climax is that the big reveal is broadcast from a television station, spreading across the world and immediately accepted by the public.
The sight of frozen crowds glued to their phones, transfixed by footage of an alien species, feels less grounded than any of the film’s fantastical plot twists.
The public being convinced of a wondrous, world-changing truth through a single news broadcast would always be a bit absurd, but feels particularly egregious in today’s media landscape, brimming with misinformation and tainted by AI-generated video.
A couple of characters do ask if the footage is AI and confirm it as authentic—that’s all it takes to convince the world that the video is to be believed.
Any notion of a shared information ecosystem has long been torn to pieces by individualized algorithms—the film’s big reveal would surely pass through the internet with barely a ripple, just another story to scroll past on the timeline.
The final scene sees an alien entity whisper a profound truth to Margaret, who turns to the camera and implores the public to “listen.”
As the credits roll, it’s hard not to imagine the subsequent explosion of conspiracy theories, memes and indifference in the wake of the reveal.
Clearly, Disclosure Day takes place in a far-flung fantasy world, in which the entirety of the human race can be completely, utterly enthralled by a televised news broadcast.
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