Disclosure Day (2026)

PG-13.  There's an f-bomb in there.  I wrote that first because I knew that I was going to forget unless I wrote that down immediately.  But among the swearing, there's one f-bomb.  Also, there's some mildly scary stuff, some of it involving blood.  The entire movie, the government is trying to kill the two protagonists.  Sometimes, it comes across as basic action.  Other times, that trying-to-kill-you thing gets pretty intense.  There's also some questions about religion and a crucifix is used to cut into skin at one point.  Still, summer blockbuster fare.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Steven Spielberg

Guys, I had a pretty darned good night.  This is the time period in parenting that I've been waiting for.  While other parents dread when their little darling angels turn into teenagers, I've been chomping at the bit.  There's a reason that I teach high school.  I need to have stimulating conversations.  Tonight, I took my older two kids to the movies to watch something that wasn't a kids' movie or wasn't part of a franchise.  I mean, I was mortified when my son said that this was his first real movie in the theatres.  My daughter blamed it on the fact that real movies aren't shown in movie theaters anymore.  I called shanannigans on that one.  I just have always understood that my kids were either too easily traumatized by stuff or didn't have the attention span to watch "real" movies in the theater.  A lot of that is on me.  It's scary not knowing what the next scene is going to be.  But now that their older and I want to unprogram them from everything being puppies and kittens, I think I might be able to take them to more movies.

These two lost their minds over this movie.  I showed them Jaws last week to prep them for this.   As a film teacher, I was pretty mortified when I found out that my oldest didn't know who Steven Spielberg was.  (To my credit, she has seen Jurassic Park and The Lost World, so that's on her.)  For them, it was probably a 10/10.  The most amazing movie they've ever seen.  I'm glad for them.  It's a solid fun time.  For me?  7/10.  While I might have had the night of my life bonding with my kids, Disclosure Day was a decent Spielberg summer movie that was bolstered a lot by having a John Williams score.  (I really hoped it was John Williams when I was listening to it.  If it wasn't, I thought whoever was doing it nailed the vibes of John Williams.) 

Disclosure Day seems to be Steven Spielberg's most recent attempt to make the same movie, only colored by his age.  I can't help but put this at the top.  We're seeing Spielberg once again touch on aliens and government agencies, the same things we've seen in E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  Heck, for all I know, Spielberg isn't that into aliens.  But when you look at E.T., you get the running from the government stuff.  When you look at Close Encounters, (which I think this movie borrows the most from) it's the message of what does humanity have to do with what's out there.  When you get Crystal Skull, it's straight up seeing aliens and what that does with our understanding of humanity and God or gods.  But we're seeing it through older Spielberg eyes.  Yeah, I claimed that Disclosure Day is fun.  It is fun.  I don't want to take that away from this movie.  It's a good time.  The problem is that it isn't as good as a time as Spielberg's early work.  There's something a little too grounded about Spielberg now, which is insane because the swings that Spielberg takes with Disclosure Day are to be admired.  

But I might think that modern Spielberg has been influenced by too many other directors.  I kind of hate that everything starting with A.I.  looks a little too blue and a little too J.J. Abrams.  I even want to say that Spielberg has been influenced by Michael Bay.  There are just too many scenes of cool guys looking at monitors and getting locations on people.  Also, this is the same Spielberg who made movies like Lincoln and War Horse.  There's nothing garage band about Spielberg anymore.  He's got multimillion dollar cameras and studios making each shot look very pretty.  I think the Spielberg who had to figure it out on the fly used humor and characterization to cover up the fact that a special effect might not pass muster.  When he has a whole studio behind him, characters and silliness kind of go out the window.  (Still, kudos for the invisible warehouse bit.  It was fun and we giggled a little.) 

Remember that I overall kind of like this movie before you get too mad at me because I have to basically gripe for a lot of this blog.  In some ways, Disclosure Day is doing so much that it's actually doing nothing at all.  From moment one, Spielberg presents the movie as a puzzle box.  Here's an example of him stealing from Christopher Nolan.  If you use the trailers for the movie to pick up on vibes, Spielberg is hesitant to tell you anything.  We know that there are aliens somehow related to this movie, but the actual drop is something that you wait almost an hour for to get any insight into.  Heck, you only really get the story spelled out for you in the last thirty to forty minutes of the movie, and even there, there's a small amount of anticlimax.  Actually, the anticlimactic reveal might be an indicator of scared Spielberg in there.  The reveal for what happened to Margaret and Daniel is filled so well that it covers up the "wait?-that's-it?-ness" of it all.  In an attempt to make his audience unpack the film, he makes the film so over the top cryptic that any reveal whatsoever feels a bit more grandiose than it actually is.

On top of that, Spielberg gets to be a little unfair about the why of it all.  If you are paying attention, the story is backdropped with a potential World War III with North Korea.  It's really not made explicit for a lot of the film.  The movie starts with Margaret auditioning with headlines from this event, but I simply understood that to be a fake story that she was reading to show that she could anchor the lead desk.  When she speaks to the Korean guest in studio, I thought that was simply implying that there were tensions between North Korea and the United States.  It was so bad that I was wondering why there was a rush at the gas station because not much of the movie let me know that people were as scared as they were.  My evidence towards this  that Margaret, speeding to work, is singing at the top of her lungs with reckless abandon.  None of that reads as "We're in the shadow of armageddon."  

Therea re things I like and there are things that I don't like about the messaging of this film.  There's a scene (that unfortunately my son asked me a question during and I wish I could rewatch that sequence) where Hugo talks about what separates man from animals.  He talks about empathy and I was super jazzed, but it also kind of seemed like an afterthought.  After all, most of the people in this movie almost lack empathy.  We have isolated characters who want to do the right thing, but the majority of people in this movie are from a secretive government agency or are just looking out for their own happiness.  They don't do so in ways that are overt.  If anything, beyond the government agents, the characters who are selfish are selfish in small, reasonable ways.  So when the movie talks about empathy, I want the story to be about that.  But I still don't get that from the film.

Also, the notion that this movie is about revealing the truth to the world is something that I keep having a hard time believing in the real world any more.  I wrote about this when I wrote about Serenity and the whole "Can't Stop the Signal" thing that was part of the marketing. It is becoming more and more difficult to believe that humanity just needs to hear the truth to become better people.  I think we're past that in our culture.  So much news is getting out there, stuff that should lend pause to what it means to be human, and we simply don't care.  Heck, it isn't that much of a hop, skip, or jump to get from reality to Disclosure Day.  The government has been begging us to listen to what they have on aliens and it doesn't even make page one.  I would love for our world to all tune into the news and actually care about what is going on.  Maybe that makes me cynical, but I don't think the Disclosure Day drop would play out the way it did.  (Also, the fact that everyone just accepted that they were watching non-doctored footage was hilarious.  I know we got a two-second throw away confirmation that nothing was AI.  Still, bananas.

(Quick thought.  I honestly thought the movie was going to start where the movie ended.  I had no idea that this was what the movie was about.) 

I'm going to write one last thing about this movie and it is something that continues to bother me in a lot of film.  I don't know a lot of movies that get the concept of faith, religion, or belief right.  There are a billion crappy movies that my mom ends up seeing, often made by Angel Studios, that nerf challenging faith pretty hard.  They present tailored stories that make faith seem like the only route out of a hopeless situation.  But when you get movies that aren't from a position of trying to evangelize, faith comes across as comically silly.  I got weirdly jazzed when I saw that Jane was a novitiate.  She was studying to become a sister and she lost her vocation.  It's oddly shoehorned into this story because Jane isn't as big of a character as the two protagonists.  If anything, Jane comes across as problematic --even when it is isn't her fault.  She becomes this big liability because she's easily possessed by Scanlon (the former university president at my very Catholic school!).  But she also disagrees with Daniel about the role of truth.  And that's where the movie loses me.

I know that Catholics have had discussions about what it would mean to find out that aliens are real.  (I know other faiths have too.  I just write about this because I happen to be pretty seriously Catholic.) The complete lack of nuance that Jane's argument has makes Catholics look ridiculous.  Jane sees the fact that humans have been in contact and have been brutalizing aliens doesn't lead her to think, "These are living creatures that are suffering.  They clearly have sentience and intelligence, probably far beyond what humans are capable of.  We should do something."   Nope.  None of that.  She immediately goes to this childlike reaction of "God doesn't exist because aliens exist and they are supreme to us."  I hate that so much.  I mean, the movie rectifies that moment later so Jane can leave this film a hero by having one of the sisters explain that the Bible says, "On Earth", which is just dumb and semantics.  It's that the film doesn't have anything to really say about this of quality.  It seems like a beat that doesn't belong in this film and isn't explored with any depth.

YOU STILL HAD TO REMEMBER THAT I LIKED THIS MOVIE!  It's fine.  It's a good time.  I won't own it unless it hits Criterion.  But still, it's a good time!