Disclosure Day (2026)
Conspiracy thriller, directed by Stephen Spielberg. Josh o'Connor plays a cyber security specialist at a sinister, US government adjecent company named Wardex who managed to steal evidence for alien contact from them and is trying to deliver it to an organization headed by Colman Domingo so it can be released while being pursued by the companies agents. Emily Blunt plays a weather announcer at a local television station with emerging psychic abilities pursued by the same agency for that reason.
So, in essence, most of Disclosure Day is a fairly simple spy thriller. There are the heroes, carrying a McGuffin, there are their pursuers, trying to get it back. All this happens before the background of a global crisis (something about a potential nuclear escalation in North Korea, basically the go to premise when you want to have a conflict that sounds plausible enough, while not being particularly realistic), with the implication being, of course, that the disclosure of alien contact would put at least a temporary stop to human conflict. You know, the Ozymandias gambit.
I did like Disclosure Day quite a bit aesthetically. It avoids most of the expected settings for a modern American action flick, the big coastal cities and landmarks, and is set mostly around the provincial midwest, taking its cat and mouse chase through the motels, gas stations and farm houses of a late winter Americana. It all speaks to a certain paranoid fantasy, being the guy who knows too much, travelling anonymous roads and spending the night in anonymous places, always with an eye open. All of this genuinely spoke to me, even if it made some of the actual action setpieces feel more than a bit contrived.
What fell flat a bit for me, was the actual Alien part of it all. Which is surprisingly not that big a part of the movie, but a very central one. I didn't exactly expect the movie to get into the weeds of ufology, to get into, like, Puharich and the Council of Nine and John C. Lilly and Indrid Cold and Project Bluebook and whatnot. There was a key scene at the start of the third act, when characters recover their repressed memories, set in a room with butterfly wallpaper, which made me consider whether the movie was doing... a thing there, if you know, you know, but I don't think that's where it was going with that. It's hard to think of the aliens as something other than an allegory, unimaginatively depicted as they are, just the plain old Roswell "Little Grey fella with a big head and big black eyes" design that we are all familiar with.
Matter of fact, a lot of the movie suggests that it wants to be thought of as more of a social commentary than a story about anything more concrete. It's a movie that's genuinely content naming a piece of Alien technology that serves as a plot device "The Device" and it's those kinds of Kojima brained blunt gestures that kind of endeared it to me, as it already feels written and directed like a flashback sequence in a Death Stranding game. What absolutely didn't work for me, however, were its stubborn attempts to find some religious angle to the material, which I'm not categorically opposed to, but the movie seems to expect me to just take them for granted. The idea that the discovery of sentient alien life would somehow invalidate most religion just doesn't strike me as plausible. Then again, a lot of its handling doesn't.
While, surely, having definitive confirmation that extraterrestrial civilizations don't only exist, but have been in contact with us would be quite a doozy, Disclosure Day leaves open what would inevitably be the two most pressing follow up questions of "Do they want anything from us?" and "Can they do anything for us?", rolling credits right as these are being addressed, leaving the audience to come to their own conclusions. And leaving the entire movie feeling like it never quite arrives at a proper thesis statement. Which isn't to say that it needs one and maybe it'll be clearer upon rewatch where exactly what it was going, but as of now it left me mostly satisfied but not exactly inspired.
There's definitely a good bit to like in Disclosure Day. The characters are likeable, the action is well directed, it's a good looking movie in general, really. There are a few neat setpieces, married as it is to the cliche depictions of aliens and alien technology in media. I appreciated its relative restraint, in not handling the subject matter with Independence Day styled bombast but letting it be the paranoid little 70's style conspiracy thriller it wants to be for long stretches at a time. It's overall a fine movie, not up there with Spielberg's best, and not down there with his worst. It just feels a bit too broadly drawn, too overly conceptual, not ready enough to build up its own iconography beyond the standardized depictions of aliens, UFO's and MIB's, but not quite ready to let them stand as pure allegory either, leaving it to feel just a bit awkward.
