Disclosure Day (2026)

***/****
starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Disclosure Day is Steven Spielberg’s Megalopolis: a cri de cœur from an old man using the entirety of his bag of tricks to persuade, to incense, to cajole a stunned generation into collective action. The villains of both films are billionaires with secrets and outsized influence in government, while the heroes are visionaries, truth-tellers, products of trauma, struggling to wake from the nightmare of the last twenty years. My fear is that Spielberg has overestimated his influence, as Coppola did–that he believes his passion will peanut-butter over the cracks in this narrative; that he’s unaware, perhaps, of how elderly–how frightened and out-of-touch–he sounds when ripping from the headlines. Spielberg’s singular importance to the formation of modern film history does nothing to keep him from aging out of the cultural moment. But he has been singular. Indeed, although he may have equals in his technical mastery of the medium, no one has ever been his superior.

Still, he’s often had trouble landing his beautifully crafted films. Spielberg’s reach in terms of story can exceed his grasp: Amistad, The Color Purple, 1941, War Horse, The Terminal (a Yakov Smirnov routine writ large), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (whose limp climax I have so thoroughly repressed that I am disappointed anew every time I watch it)… He doesn’t have the muscle for a down ending, thus his tendency to graft on an upbeat one, no matter the risk of tissue rejection. He found a happily-ever-after for a Philip K. Dick story, for fuck’s sake. (Ditto J.G. Ballard.) He tacked a framing story onto Saving Private Ryan, a treacly surprise family reunion onto War of the Worlds. He added a tearful, beseeching speech to Schindler’s List, a project poached from Billy Wilder. Has a director this talented ever had so few genuine masterpieces to show for it? Oh, but when he hits the ball square, he changes the world. It’s no wonder he’s swinging for the fences in Disclosure Day, with the fate of the planet at stake within and without the picture. Spielberg tried to explain his predilection for pap in The Fabelmans as the product of being worried about the power he has over us–but whether Peter Pan gets older or not, his lost boys do. Disclosure Day won’t accomplish what he hopes it will. It won’t save us. Nothing will save us.

He sure is trying with Disclosure Day by revisiting key moments from his formidable filmography, evoking the people we were when we watched his unassailable classics for the first time. And then he’s saying it’s those people, the we we used to be, who can fix the world. It also recalls other, non-Spielberg films, particularly Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, not only in its episodic chase structure but also in terms of how Spielberg has reset after a film-length psychosexual confession à la Vertigo (The Fabelmans, in Spielberg’s case) with a movie designed to play the hits and remind us why we loved him in the first place. There are shades of The Abyss, too, in its world-on-the-brink and alien-intervention premise, not to mention WarGames, but I’m getting ahead of myself. In Disclosure Day, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is a bubbly meteorologist for a Dallas affiliate who one day becomes omniscient. Dan Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is a brilliant cybersecurity guard who decides to whistleblow the secrets his evil tech-bro boss, Scanlon (Colin Firth), has been keeping from the world since 1973. (Dan has a bag full of flash drives.) If you immediately equate the release of a massive trove of damning information about powerful people with the still-undisclosed Epstein Files, well, of course Disclosure Day is an allegory for that.

What Disclosure Day is up against is our own ability to normalize literally anything almost immediately now. This means its entire Watchmen/“The Architects of Fear” premise fails in the face of real-world evidence to the contrary. We accept school shootings. We accept gerrymandering and the eradication of trans rights. We accept genocide on our dime, the pardoning of everyone trying to overthrow the government on January 6^th, that we passed the red line for reversing climate change and never looked back. We accept the eradication of the rule of law and the wholesale looting of this country and its people. We accept that most of us won’t wear a mask to save someone else’s life. If Trump were to use a child as a human shield during one of the weekly attempts on his life, it wouldn’t end his career, Greg Stillson-style; it would add a few points to his favourability amongst his slavering base, however. What sweet summer children we were. And you’re trying to tell me disclosing that space aliens are real will cause everyone around the world to decide to give an ounce of a shit again? Well, that kind of happened already, and, you guessed it, nobody cares.

But, boy, do they care in Disclosure Day, leading to a handful of indelible sequences, choreographed to perfection and possessed of that ineffable Spielberg sublimity. Even the worst of Spielberg (which this is not) is worth watching. Here, a car plowing into a house is captured in a medium shot that pulls back in rhythm with the offending vehicle until we see a figure sitting very still in an unmolested room on the other side of a wall. Incredible. Another shot swoops over an open laptop and peers at its screen from upside-down to elicit a sense of vertigo, maybe interstellar weightlessness, along with the fear and exhilaration of the reveal of an alien in archival video playing on the computer. That same camera move repeats as another alien reveals itself to our heroes in person. A chase involving two cars and two trains feels heavy with the weight of the machinery, yet retains the verve and charm of the paper-airplane sequence from Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin. It’s like how the truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark, roughly the 10-kazillionth truck chase in the history of movies by 1980, miraculously feels like the first one. Spielberg has an unerring command of time and space, not to mention an emotional intelligence that’s off the charts whenever he taps into it–hence the feeling of real risk in some of his films, the sense that the world may actually be decided through the struggles of imaginary people. Elliott finding E.T. in the creek is one of the great scarifying moments of our collective childhood in the shared generational monoculture of one of the most-watched films of all time. A boy and his dog, just as intended.

Alas, despite the genius of its technical accomplishments, Disclosure Day only has one moment that resonates on anything approaching an existential level. Spielberg’s urge to awaken the child in us supercedes the necessity to convince the dead adult imprisoning it to free it. In the middle of the film, a woman named Jane (Eve Hewson), a failed novitiate, gives herself a bloody stigmata–first with a crucifix, then with a kitchen knife–to stave off what to her must feel like demonic possession. Intimate and bloody, the scene feels plucked from Something Evil, Spielberg’s made-for-TV Rosemary’s Baby knock-off and a dry run for Poltergeist, in which a mother played by Sandy Dennis begins to suspect that something, well, evil is after her little boy’s soul. Jane should be the centre of this film. It’s Jane who suffers a crisis of faith (written brashly and condescendingly by longtime offender David Koepp); Jane who makes the greatest sacrifice of bodily autonomy; Jane who is the best cautionary warning about the dangers of a surveillance state and a fascist government interested in controlling a woman’s body. The two implements of her auto-mutilation are tools of the Church and the expectations of the patriarchy.

Jane is a goldmine, the only character written in a way that honours the performance. (While the cast is uniformly superlative, they’re not given much to do: Olympic swimmers in a child’s blow-up pool.) When she’s gone, Disclosure Day becomes another Tintin adventure. In 1963, moviegoers might have bought into this “common call” idea, in which the world unites against a single threat looming over us all, one short year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. We might have still swallowed it in 1989, the year before the Iron Curtain came tumbling down and the Russian Bear was the bogey in our collective forest. In 2026, though? No. The ship has sailed on the notion that anything will or could raise our gorge enough to overcome our self-interest. Even the promise of a new Spielberg joint once carried with it a “stop everything” cultural gravitas, but no longer. A day late, a dollar short. The two worst things about old men screaming at the sky are that they’re usually right to scream and that no one’s listening. It’s Project Hail Marys as far as the eye can see: the only way through is out, a little buddy made of stone by your side. Splendid interstellar isolation in a place we haven’t destroyed yet. But it was worth a shot.