‘Disclosure Day’ (2026) Review

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Disclosure Day brings in an unfortunate descriptor I rarely use with Steven Spielberg movies, but feels all too applicable here: messy.

My first indicator of this is that this movie seems to start in the middle of this story. Now, I normally appreciate when a movie cuts out the opening explanatory crap, but this skips past to only then dump exposition on us in the following scenes.

Thus, it feels like we’re in this constant sense of trying to catch up with this convoluted plot. As this chase for stolen alien secrets and technology gets underway, we unfortunately never get a good sense of these characters through the complexity and scale of this story that’s always moving.

By keeping this story overplotted and in a constant state of motion, we never learn anything about any of these major characters we spend so much time with. Instead of feeling like genuine people experiencing this phenomenon, they come across as vessels for this story, with nothing tangible to latch onto as nuanced characters. I’ll give Emily Blunt somewhat of a pass through her newfound emotional understanding, but I’m not on board with this as any sort of “revelatory” performance.

But, for Kellner (Josh O’Connor) and Scanlon (Colin Firth), we need to understand their past and motives for these characters to resonate. While we understand Kellner’s goal, we get nothing from his character besides “hacker who doesn’t remember his childhood”.

And for Scanlon, he’s an absolutely abysmal villain. Intimidating at first, but gives no real reasoning to his oppression, and by the end just kinda throws in the towel and gives up. Feels like some totally missed opportunities for character-driven emotional storytelling, which Spielberg usually does so well.

This overhauled focus on this full-length chase interrupts the running themes of mass truth disclosure and religious faith regarding aliens. They come up then feel dropped to focus on another set piece or exposition dump. A key quote given to a side character is “you didn’t lose your faith in God, you lost your faith in people.” A profound idea for the world reckoning with destruction as this essential truth about extra-terrestrials is revealed, but stays too far in the background to have any real impact. I seem to be in the minority with this idea, but I couldn’t help but be so disappointed in how Spielberg seemed to toss these more weighty concepts to the side in favor of more spectacle.

Then, for how much sci-fi content is thrown at the wall here, this plot barely holds up to any interrogation. Why didn’t they take all three alien devices? Can these devices do anything the writer wants them to? What do these devices do for the aliens? How did none of the tons of army people leak any of this info that has been around for decades? What creates the crop circles? Why did Wakefield hold onto an alien for this long? Why did they rebuild an entire house for Margaret if they only used the bedroom for the experiment? Why is this Wardex group the most incompetent force ever assembled? This movie brought up a thousand questions that weren’t intriguing, but instead frustrating. Again, I don’t need everything explained, but a lot of this just felt like lazy writing.

The real failure comes in the form of this finale and shows Spielberg’s naive optimism and unfortunate distance from modernity. Spielberg seems to believe in a collective conscience of worldwide interest in something like Disclosure Day, but it just wouldn’t happen like this. That might be my cynicism, but it has no bearing in reality, thus draining it of its emotional impact. Though they aren’t quite at this existential level, modern revelations of truth and evidence of inhumanity have led absolutely nowhere in recent years.

Events like the releases of the Epstein files and actual UAP findings have led to a grand collective nothing. Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit feeds will continuously show terrible acts that we now see every day, but don’t shake people out of their routine. So, this sequence with THE ENTIRE WORLD watching from their phones as the news debuts “disclosure day”, it appears like a boomer’s daydream of a much more connected world than the one we actually live in. Maybe I’m just looking at his optimism wrong, but I know these sorts of things felt different in a lot of Spielberg’s other films.

That said, it’s got that cinematic look you’d expect from Spielberg, especially seeing this in a 70mm print. Re-collaborating with Janusz Kamiński, the look of this kept me drawn in. The conspiracy-tinged appearance, matched with another great work from John Williams, makes it hard to deny Disclosure Day‘s beauty. If I were to recommend this movie for anything, it’s by far the technical aspects (outside of the terrible CGI animals).

An unfortunate disappointment for the year. As one of the greats releasing a movie for 2026, my hopes were a lot higher for what Spielberg would bring. Though you can see him working through his view of the world and how we would reckon with the actual immediacy of aliens among us, there’s too much going on here for him to deliver these ideas with the wonder and affection we’ve seen him so time and time again. I’m always glad if a movie gets people back to the theater, but I’m a bit confused by the response to this one so far, given how all over the place it can be.