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Spoiler alert: This review includes spoilers for several aspects of Disclosure Day.
Foundational to a Spielbergian sensibility is unabashed wonder, an awe-inducing image that, when seen on a 30-foot cinema screen, can truly astonish. It’s hard to forget, for instance, the first time we see a dinosaur in Jurassic Park or young Elliott flying past the moon with a friendly alien in tow in E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. But despite Spielberg’s latest summer blockbuster, Disclosure Day, being about visitors from the stars, its moment of wonder is anything but otherworldly.
Disclosure Day — spoiler alert — builds up to its final moments, which take place in the control room of a news station as a Kansas City affiliate breaks worldwide news about the existence of aliens and government obfuscation of their existence, as well as abuses toward them. Despite the alien’s visages being mostly missing from the film’s advertising, they are shown in archival footage very early in the film’s runtime. Instead, its moment of awe comes during the titular disclosure, as every major news network — NBC, ABC News, CNN, Fox News, 24-hour news channels across geographic, linguistic and political spectrums — unite to broadcast previously-buried alien footage.
Part of Spielberg’s hopecore filmmaking ethos is that humans will unite against threats, whether external (aliens, sharks, dinosaurs) or internal (war and other human atrocities). That extends to Disclosure, as well, which follows cybersecurity expert and whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who has stolen video footage he was hired to protect from Wardex Corp, a shadow organization within the U.S. government that has been hiding knowledge of alien existence for eight decades since the 1947 Roswell crash. On the run after stealing the sensitive files, O’Connor skips town alongside his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), a former nun-in-training. Meanwhile, Kansas City TV meteorologist Maggie Fairchild (Emily Blunt), approached by a cardinal before work one morning, suddenly begins speaking fluently in other languages and finds herself, after speaking in a tongue no human can understand, on the run from Wardex goons. Disclosure Day moves at a clip’s pace as both Maggie and Daniel look to escape Wardex’s surveillance while also finding each other.
Global conflict complements and contrasts with the film’s personal narrative: as Fairchild goes about her day at work, anchors talk about Russian aggression and armed conflicts happening across the world. As they cut into programming for alien-related news, a station manager questions the wisdom of interrupting coverage of a potential World War 3 in order to break life-altering news.
Which brings us back, of course, to our moment of wonder: rather than when we see an alien’s face for the first time, the moment that will stick with theater goers far after the lights have gone up is the scene when humans see atrocities on their phones and begin to gasp. Bloodied, bruised and disemboweled alien bodies and a government that knew the truth. Of course, the moment on screen reflects the very world we live in, where the worst horrors are a part of our daily doomscroll alongside ads for cardigans and recipes for weekly meal prep. However, Spielberg sets these arresting images apart: they are unignorable. And, in showing us an audience moved to tears by these images, Spielberg hopes to remind us of the power of cinema to engender empathy.
All of this seems to be the hallmark of a filmmaker who is trying to make sense of what moving images can mean to the modern viewer. Interestingly enough, Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, within a few months of the Roswell, New Mexico, crash that the film alludes to several times. Characters remind us of the 79-year span between then and now, which corresponds exactly with Spielberg’s own age. Disclosure feels like a Spielberg retrospective, not only because he is returning to themes — as well as filmmaking tricks — that have served him well throughout his career in a sort of greatest-hits-compilation, but because he seems to be wrestling with what it means to put images out into the world and whether his filmmaking has been meaningful. It’s a paeon to the power of the moving image.
Ultimately, Disclosure is concerned with whether, in our modern world, film can still unite humanity in concern. In a particularly tense exchange between Wardex head Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) and Wardex defector Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), Wakefield attempts to sway Scanlon on the importance of sharing the reality of alien life with the world. His primary argument: the beings that have come to earth have empathy as a core tenet of their civilization and use it as a sort of organizing principle. Domingo offers no contrast as to how humans organize their own civilization, but such an omission is one of the film’s fun fill-in-the-blank moments. Are we organized around money? Power? Regardless of the answer, Domingo proposes their core philosophy as an antidote to what ails humanity.
As with many other flicks in his filmography, including the similar Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg uses Disclosure Day to plumb conspiratorial thinking. But while our conspiracy theory-ridden times are within his purview (Spielberg is a noted believer that aliens walk among us), Spielberg seems to be in search of answers for a way out. He is less interested in what is being hidden and instead asks how we might come together to react to, and address, the harsh realities on our screens.
Which brings us back to the final moment of wonder. In our deeply divided, post-truth world, it’s almost impossible to imagine every news outlet being on the same wavelength. But, in the suspended disbelief of cinema, they are, and crucially, as Spielberg argues, to human survival. Disclosure Day, and Spielberg, know that, even when it comes to the news we choose to watch, humans are not speaking the same language. But, if we can all agree on the enormity and severity of what we are facing, we can get on the same page.
