Reported by Manit Maneephantakun
Steven Spielberg’s new science-fiction film may begin with alien arrival, government secrets, and a cover-up that has lasted nearly 80 years. But its true destination lies somewhere far more intimate: faith, memory, childhood wounds, and the power of cinema to make the whole world “see” the same thing at the same time.
For more than half a century in cinema, Steven Spielberg has never been simply a director fascinated by extraterrestrial life. He has always been an artist who uses “what lies beyond Earth” to ask some of the most essential questions about humanity on Earth. From the childlike awe of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the tenderness of friendship in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, to the fear and survival instinct of War of the Worlds, aliens in Spielberg’s universe have never been mere outsiders. They are mirrors reflecting human fear, hope, and our deep need to believe in something larger than ourselves.
In Disclosure Day, Spielberg returns to the territory he knows so well: science fiction and the story of alien arrival. Yet what makes the film fascinating is that he does not return simply to replay his greatest hits. This is not Spielberg repeating an old melody in the same familiar rhythm. Instead, the film feels like the late-career work of an artist no longer interested in proving himself through perfection, but in examining the obsessions that have followed him throughout his life in cinema: family, faith, memory, state power, childhood trauma, emotional control, and the question of whether cinema itself can truly become an instrument of truth.
What makes Disclosure Day special is that it feels both old-school and new-school at once. It carries the classic architecture of a Hitchcockian chase thriller, especially in the way an ordinary man is pulled into the centre of a vast conspiracy. At the same time, it has a psychological and memory-driven complexity that recalls more contemporary works such as Inception. Yet all of it is filtered unmistakably through Spielberg’s own cinematic language: his ability to take something that sounds completely absurd on paper and make us believe in it with surprising sincerity.
The story begins with Daniel Kellner, played by Josh O’Connor, a cybersecurity specialist who possesses crucial evidence of aliens arriving on Earth in 1947, and of the decades-long suppression of that truth. A powerful corporation called Wardex, led by Noah Scanlon, played by Colin Firth, is determined to stop the information from reaching the public. Daniel is forced to flee with his girlfriend Jane Blankenship, played by Eve Hewson, as his mission to reveal the truth gradually expands from a conventional chase narrative into something stranger, more emotional, and far more personal.
Wardex is not merely a cartoonish evil corporation. It becomes a symbol of institutional power operating quietly beside the state across generations, managing, hiding, and controlling information about extraterrestrial contact. The idea Spielberg chooses to explore is both ambitious and almost comically grand: if the truth were finally revealed, humanity would be shaken not only by the existence of aliens, but by the discovery that humans themselves had imprisoned and mistreated them without mercy for almost 80 years.
This is Spielberg’s boldness in Disclosure Day. He takes two modern myths the world knows well, Roswell and crop circles, ideas usually placed in the realm of rumour, conspiracy, or hoax, and treats them with a straight-faced seriousness. What could have become a joke in another director’s hands becomes the foundation of a film that is fun, messy, sincere, and filled with belief. Spielberg does not hide the fact that he still believes in wonder. More importantly, he does not hide the fact that he still believes cinema has the right to make us look up at the sky again with a child’s hope.
The other crucial storyline belongs to Margaret Fairchild, played by Emily Blunt, a Kansas City weather presenter who suddenly begins speaking foreign languages without knowing it, reading people’s minds, and becoming central to a mystery deeply connected to Daniel. In another filmmaker’s hands, Margaret could have been treated simply as a “person with powers,” a familiar science-fiction device. But for Spielberg, she is the emotional heart of the film. She is a vessel of memory, a carrier of trauma, and a living metaphor for what cinema has always done to its audience: reaching the deepest parts of the human mind through image, sound, rhythm, and editing.
Emily Blunt is the magnetic centre of the film. Her Margaret is funny, fast-moving, anxious, ambitious in the way of a local media personality longing to be taken seriously, and vulnerable in ways that slowly reveal themselves. The scenes in which she begins speaking Russian or Korean without awareness, reads the private thoughts of a traffic officer who pulls her over, or emits strange clicking sounds during a live weather report, allow the film’s ridiculousness to operate at full force. But Blunt plays these moments with such precision that the comedy never undermines the character’s mystery.
This may be one of Blunt’s most enjoyable performances in recent years. She does not play Margaret merely as a victim of supernatural events, but as a human being trying to keep up with her own body, memory, and inner voices. She makes a character who could easily have felt completely outlandish become someone we willingly follow. At moments, she even feels like an emotional descendant of the Tom Hanks figure in Spielberg’s cinematic world: an ordinary person thrown into events far larger than life, yet still able to preserve a sense of warmth, decency, and humanity.
Josh O’Connor gives the film a different kind of weight through restraint and unease. Daniel is not a hero who announces himself as one. He is an ordinary man pushed into the centre of a world-changing event. His face carries the tension of someone bearing a moral burden rather than the confidence of a conventional action protagonist. Jane, played by Eve Hewson, gives the film one of its most intriguing spiritual dimensions. As a former novitiate who once stood close to a religious life, she must confront the possibility that proof of alien life may not destroy faith, but expand or complicate it in ways she never imagined.
Jane’s crisis of faith gives Disclosure Day a richer layer of complexity. She is not simply Daniel’s girlfriend, but a figure representing humanity’s uncertainty before a larger cosmic truth. How would the existence of extraterrestrial life change the relationship between humanity and God? The film does not dismiss religion easily, nor does it blindly elevate science as the only answer. Instead, it attempts to create a space where faith, truth, and cosmology can speak to one another. Some of these conversations may feel overly arranged, but the ambition is admirable in an era when many blockbusters avoid big questions in favour of safer spectacle.
Colman Domingo’s Hugo Wakefield is another element that gives the film its pull. Hugo is a leader, a protector, and almost a shadow director arranging something behind the scenes. His workspace, gradually revealed to be a kind of “staging area,” turns Disclosure Day into more than a film about exposing secrets. It becomes a film about how truth must be staged in order to be seen correctly. Here, Spielberg seems to speak directly about the mechanics of cinema itself. Sometimes truth does not simply appear. It must be arranged, directed, and presented in a way that allows humanity to receive it.
The strongest quality of Disclosure Day is its willingness to turn a large-scale science-fiction blockbuster into something unexpectedly personal. Spielberg is not interested only in asking, “Do aliens exist?” He is more interested in what humanity would do if that truth were finally revealed. Would religion survive? Would belief be replaced by a new form of worship? And when truth is presented through images, media, and authority, does it remain a form of liberation — or does it become another kind of control disguised as hope?
In this sense, the film is far more ambitious than simply being “another Spielberg alien movie.” It feels like the director turning the camera back on his own way of thinking. Daniel is a man of information, numbers, code, and strategy. He carries the evidence that could change the world. Margaret, by contrast, is a person of feeling, memory, and performance. She does not simply understand others; she can touch the images inside their minds, much like a filmmaker shaping the emotions of an audience through cinema. This contrast makes the film fascinating, because Spielberg seems to acknowledge that truth alone is not enough. There must also be someone capable of making the world feel that truth.
The film moves with the rhythm of a chase thriller, filled with escapes, confrontations, and action sequences that Spielberg still directs with remarkable control. Its pleasure lies in how fully it embraces the extravagance of its own premise. Car chases, mysterious objects, secret corporations, psychic abilities, and cosmic secrets all sound excessive on paper. But Spielberg keeps them moving with the energy of an old-fashioned adventure film, one that is unafraid of implausibility as long as the audience’s emotions are running alongside the characters.
More compelling than the action, however, is the sense that Spielberg is playing with the language of cinema itself. The scenes in which Margaret uses her powers do not always rely on grand technological spectacle. Instead, they often draw from cinema’s most basic tools: editing, visual rhythm, the cut between one face and another, and the emotional power of a gaze. These moments turn Disclosure Day into a film that speaks about cinema through cinema.
Still, the scale of Spielberg’s vision means the film is not without flaws. At times, it carries too many storylines and ideas, almost overwhelming its own balance. Some scenes lean into familiar Spielbergian sentimentality so heavily that they risk becoming too sweet. This is especially true in the sequence that brings Margaret back to confront her childhood memories through a reconstructed home. The idea is beautiful, but the execution sometimes feels overly designed, closer to an emotional stage play than to the raw truth of lived experience.
Another important point is that the old rule of monster and alien cinema still applies: what is frightening or wondrous is often most powerful when it remains unseen. Spielberg has understood this since Jaws. The shark beneath the water is often more terrifying than the shark fully revealed, and the same is true of his aliens. In Disclosure Day, the moments when extraterrestrial life is present only as signal, sound, trace, memory, or sensation passing through the characters are often more powerful than the moments when the film must show them directly. Some of the mystery inevitably diminishes once the unknown becomes too concrete.
And yet these imperfections do not weaken the film. On the contrary, they make Disclosure Day feel alive as a work willing to take risks. Spielberg at this stage of his career is not making his most polished film. He is making one that openly reveals his beliefs, fears, and ambitions. He believes in the power of cinema. He believes in the possibility that the whole world might one day turn toward the same image, hear the same sound, and perhaps understand the same truth. That belief is beautiful, idealistic, and slightly unsettling all at once.
The ending of Disclosure Day matters not only because the world finally sees proof of alien life, but because Spielberg turns the act of “seeing together” into cinema’s ultimate fantasy. The entire world becomes one audience in one theatre. Truth is projected before everyone. The filmmaker, as the controller of images, becomes almost the keeper of collective awakening. This is both the dream and the danger of the film. The power to make people believe together can be a form of liberation, but it can also become a form of domination.
What makes this film so deeply Spielbergian is not only the aliens, the chase, or the image of a newly constructed family. It is the desire to return to a childhood state in which wonder was still possible. The Fabelmans brought Spielberg back to the origins of cinema in his life through pain and autobiographical truth. Disclosure Day, by contrast, uses aliens as another route home. It becomes a fantasy of recovered memory, an attempt to reclaim the moment when human beings could look up at the sky and feel that anything might still be possible.
The final word of the film, “Listen,” carries more weight than it first appears to. It is not merely a command for the characters to stop and listen. It feels like a statement from a director who has spent his life making audiences look, listen, believe, fear, cry, and hope together. In Disclosure Day, Spielberg no longer hides behind the curtain. He steps forward and allows us to see more clearly than ever that behind the aliens, the chases, the secrets, and the wonders, what has always fascinated him is the power of cinema to organize human feeling.
Disclosure Day may not be Spielberg’s most perfect film, but it is one of his most revealing late-career works. It is fun, chaotic, excessive, sentimental, strange, and admirably ambitious. This is the work of a director who still believes that the cinema can be a shared space of wonder, and who still asks what humanity would do if confronted with a truth too large to contain. Would we fear it, worship it, resist it, or simply become still enough to listen?
Verdict:
Disclosure Day is Spielberg at once familiar and unexpectedly renewed. It is a large-scale science-fiction film that begins with aliens, but ends with cinema, faith, memory, and the classical pleasure of old-fashioned adventure. It may not be flawless in every moment, but it is filled with the energy of a filmmaker who still dares to believe wholeheartedly in the magic of cinema.
Rating: 4 / 5
