‘Disclosure Day’ Review: Spielberg Completes the Circle on His Lifelong Obsession With Extraterrestrial Life

There’s a little bird that every morning, more or less at the same time, starts pecking at one of the windows of my house. It does it seven or eight times and then flies away. If it notices someone watching, it flees before finishing. What strikes me as a mildly inexplicable curiosity — why always the same window, always the same hour? — could open up an entire cinematic universe for Steven Spielberg. In a world where conspiracy theories have become the default operating system for millions of people, the man wouldn’t think the bird was some kind of government spy drone. He’d think something far more complex, far more encompassing — something that might involve the entire universe.

Before the internet scrambled the brains of half the world’s population with absurd theories about nearly everything — vaccines with microchips, flat earth, reptilian overlords, and several others even more unhinged —, conspiracy theories at least had the decency to rest on somewhat plausible foundations. The ’60s and ’70s were their golden age. The distrust that followed political assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate gave the world permission to imagine what governments and corporations might be hiding. The United States, in particular, has always been fertile ground for that kind of thinking.

Of all those theories, perhaps the most enduring is the one about extraterrestrial life on Earth. From the Roswell incident in 1947 to recent congressional hearings, the idea that beings from other planets are or have been among us has only multiplied. And the person most responsible for burning that idea into the popular imagination — at least initially — is Spielberg himself. Alien movies have existed since the dawn of cinema and exploded in the 1950s, but films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. cemented them in the consciousness of a couple of generations, thanks to their emotional credibility, their cinematic power, and the imagination of a filmmaker capable of bringing epic scale, humanity, and even tenderness to ideas that, with rare exceptions, had previously been handled in far blunter and more simplistic ways.

Disclosure Day is, by Spielberg’s own account, an attempt to sum up his career in science fiction and alien cinema. In some sense, it’s more than that. If you set aside, for a moment, the idea that the film deals with corporations guarding those kinds of secrets in the manner of The X-Files, it could just as easily be read as a chase movie — one that draws on other films in his catalog: Duel, Sugarland Express, and even the Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park franchises, which at their core are nothing but pursuit films combining action, suspense, narrow escapes, and a lot of running. Here, that Spielberg blends with the one who made Minority Report, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and War of the Worlds (and Poltergeist, if you like) to produce a film that contains nearly the entire pop mythology of its author.

Note: no spoilers, but the review discusses events from the film’s first act.

The film opens as a classical thriller, closer in register to The Post than to anything supernatural: a corporation pursuing a man who holds secrets he intends to make public. That man is Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a mathematician who worked for a company called WARDEX, left it, and walked out with classified documents that would prove the existence of extraterrestrial life on Earth. He’s not alone — several former employees, led by his ex-boss Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), have broken away and are determined to tell the world the truth at a moment when civilization appears to be edging toward World War III.

Pursuing them is the corporation’s head, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), who will stop at nothing to keep that information buried. From the outset it’s clear that something real is at stake: Daniel carries a small remote-control-shaped object that everyone seems to fear, and which allows him to fend off his pursuers when they close in. With it, he rescues his girlfriend (Eve Hewson), who has been taken hostage by Scanlon’s men, and escapes — at least temporarily — from a massive, militarized manhunt. She, a former nun, hides him in a convent, a narrative turn that functions mainly to introduce the religious dimension of these questions.

Running parallel to all of this, Margaret Fairchild (a hyperkinetic Emily Blunt) is a TV meteorologist in Kansas City, Missouri. One day, at home with her partner (Wyatt Russell), a small red bird approaches her and stares at her for a few long seconds, leaving her unsettled. From that moment on, Margaret develops a kind of supernatural ability — she can read the thoughts of everyone around her, speak in multiple languages, and eventually suffers a live on-air breakdown during which she begins speaking in an incomprehensible language of sounds. From there, Disclosure Day works to connect these two storylines, generating a long and tense series of chases, hideouts, and betrayals, all building toward one question: can Daniel and Margaret manage to reveal not only what governments and corporations have been concealing, but the deeply personal connection each of them has to the extraterrestrial life at the center of it all?

From early on, Spielberg seems determined to share the film’s mysteries with the audience rather than withhold them. That something strange lies behind the corporation’s secrets is obvious from the moment that little device works its magic on screen. And that Margaret’s behavior is anything but normal is equally apparent. What seems to interest the director, beyond establishing that, is building an intense thriller — in which he gives full rein to his talent for sustained suspense sequences, particularly one involving a train and a moving car in simultaneous motion — while pursuing two more specific goals: charting the relationship between the two protagonists, understanding how each of them is personally implicated in the larger story, and ultimately asking what use it could possibly be, in a world teetering on the edge of self-destruction, to finally tell the truth. Can human beings handle these revelations? Will they help or will they only make things worse?

The hardest thing Spielberg has to manage is the shift from a seventies-style paranoid thriller with a grounded, realistic texture to the kind of science fiction he mastered in his classic films. It’s a difficult leap, one that would put most filmmakers in serious trouble, and it works here more on the strength of his craft and the trust — even the affection — that audiences bring to his name than on the somewhat unsteady screenplay by veteran David Koepp. Disclosure Day doesn’t have the capacity to astonish the way Close Encounters did — and audiences no longer have the innocence of 1977 — but it does manage to reconnect with Spielberg’s grand mythology of the relationship between humans and extraterrestrials.

There is also a more direct, political reading available. At its core, this is a film about empathy, about human connection, and about the possibility that there is far more to the universe than the petty disputes that grind us down every day. It’s no accident that the backdrop of the entire story — filling the television screens visible throughout — is the looming threat of a new world war involving nations from every continent. In that sense, the film works as an update of The Day the Earth Stood Still or even 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of Spielberg’s favorite films, visually quoted here more than once. It is a «we are not alone in the universe» told, from a new vantage point, by the filmmaker who once made us believe that extraterrestrials exist, that they walk among us, and that they might just help us understand each other a little better.