Disclosure Day

Since his feature début Firelight, through Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and ET The Extra-Terrestrial, Steven Spielberg has repeatedly returned to the question of whether our celestial neighbourhood has other occupants. His newest film, Disclosure Day, arrives more than four decades after ET, and can oddly be considered its liturgical continuation. Margaret (Emily Blunt), a weather presenter with aspirations of becoming a news anchor, and Daniel (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity wunderkind, are both connected to an event from their childhoods, around the same time Elliott Taylor would have been cycling across the sky with ET in his bicycle basket.

Disclosure Day opens inside the point of view of a pro wrestler being beaten into semi-consciousness, grounding Spielberg’s latest alien encounter in choreographed violence before it ever reaches for the celestial. The scene introduces Daniel as he scrambles to secure the release of his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) from the claws of Wardex, a dubious government defense contractor. He outsmarts them, and not for the first time, escaping with Jane without relinquishing the data he has stolen – information that, according to him, has the capacity to change the world.

And the world is in need of changing. News reports pierce the ambient noise to suggest that World War III is looming, though the adversaries are stale Cold War Hollywood go-tos. The film then shifts to a Kansas City newsroom, where Margaret, on her way to work, discovers that she possesses unusual abilities, culminating in her speaking a foreign, glottal language on air. As she and Daniel begin gravitating toward each other, Hugo (Colman Domingo) enters the picture alongside a handful of other ex-Wardex employees. Together, they are working to expose the secrets their former employer has kept on behalf of the government, giving shape to the event known as Disclosure Day.

In what feels like the D-Day of the 21st century, information takes the place of warfare, while faith traditions are probed for whether their scriptures can accommodate this new truth. Colin Firth is almost unrecognisable, save for the cadence of his voice, as Noah Scanlon, the head of the sinister corporation who argues that humanity, already on the brink, cannot handle the truth. Even Jane, whose past as an almost-nun initially instills in her a fear that humanity will not be able to cope, becomes part of the film’s larger question – what does revelation do to belief?

Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp rely on a fairly archaic formula, assigning antagonism to a single man and his corporation. It is a formula that worked wonders in ET, but it does not quite compute in the present-day ecosystem, where indifference, institutional inertia and ordinary mundanity are often harder villains to beat. The duo are clearly evoking an earlier era of cinema, one in which aliens had a recognisable shape and villains were evil made flesh.

But Disclosure Day is paced almost perfectly, reconciling contemporary attention spans with Spielberg’s old-fashioned sense of wonder. There is enough nostalgia in John Williams’ score, which never disappoints, to make the whole thing work. It is worth noting that Spielberg and Williams’ creative partnership has lasted longer than most Hollywood marriages. Emily Blunt, meanwhile, gives one of her career-best performances, finding in Margaret a lightness and urgency not always associated with the British actress.

Perhaps it is gauche to call a director approaching 80 naïve, but that is the sentiment that lingers as Disclosure Day itself unfolds, with Margaret and Daniel taking over her Kansas City news station to deliver the truth. The stolen data is broadcast live; feeds are picked up by other networks across the country and then around the world. The collective attention of humanity is held, when recent history suggests that nothing can hold it for that long, at least not meaningfully. Even more eyebrow-raising is the way rank is broken inside newsrooms to get the truth out. Long gone are the days of the journalistic bravado Spielberg once dramatised in The Post.

Disclosure Day arrives with serendipitous timing, exposing its own naïveté against reality – no disclosure day could easily break through the institutional chill now hanging over the Bari Weiss CBS News, and we have seen what can happen to those who try, or simply protest. With the use of AI spiralling out of control, and with our growing inability to distinguish the real from the fabricated, classified videos could not easily break through the grotesque gullible cynicism that has taken hold of us: “believing anything and nothing at the same time.”

Still, there is food for thought in what Spielberg is trying to do. Freedom of information matters now more than ever. No matter how ugly, destabilising or dissonance-inducing the truth may be, humanity can and should face it. No single government, and certainly no private contractor acting in its name, should be allowed to control it.

Reviewed on: 11 Jun 2026