If I gave you a million guesses spread over a hundred years, I guarantee you would never be able to predict the opening shot of Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day (2026). Here it is: the camera places us in the position of a prone combatant in a noisy, sweaty wrestling ring, and a hirsute hulk in a singlet is pounding down on our face with the sole of his boot, violently, again and again. And so begins this story of alien coverups, in media wrestlemania.
The wrestling setting, we quickly realize, has absolutely nothing to do with the plot. It’s just a seemingly-random place where we’ll be introduced to Dr. Kellner (Josh O’Connor) as he attempts to evade a shadowy agency whose secrets he’s pilfered. So, why are we here? Why is this absurd boot-in-the-face shot, something seemingly pulled from a Sam Raimi flick, the all-important first image in the long-awaited latest from the world’s most famous director? Maybe because Disclosure Day is about the way the powers at large have treated their citizenry by hiding the truth – and how this ought to be rectified – and so we need to assume a starting position. And that starting position is apparently prone, vulnerable, down on the bloodied mat, stomped upon by violent, goofy showmen who treat us like dirt. To where will Spielberg raise us from there?
There may never have been a cockier film, seen from a certain angle. Spielberg already did something amazing with his previous picture, The Fablemans, by giving audiences an autobiographical Rosetta Stone for his entire career, sending analysts flocking to the back-catalogue to reexamine all the themes of family, incest, betrayal, and guilt, now to be cross-referenced against this new appendix. But, Oedipal family drama aside, there was another idea in The Fablemans: a boy discovers the power to remake the world for everyone, and reckons, Spider-Manly, with this great responsibility. Remember, in particular, how the precocious filmmaker shook a bully to his core by turning him into an object of reverence. The cockiness in Disclosure Day is an extension of this, enlarging that idea into a metaphor that now encompasses the entire world. You can see Spielberg, at the twilight of his career, identifying his art with the man who can reveal all secrets, and remake reality. If he dares, and if they let him.
For some, Spielberg will always be judged and classified by his alien flicks, the way Scorsese is pinioned to his mob movies. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is an obvious point of comparison. Like David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Close Encounters is a document of an artist at the very moment they realize that they’ve ascended irreversibly to a higher level of fame, and are now in the middle of a frightening break with the world, people, and stakes that once defined them. It’s an incredible film, but also kind of chillingly self-absorbed. Not only because the hero abandons his family with barely a backwards glance, but because transcendence is so personal: one guy getting aboard the spaceship, blasting off into the ether as the credits roll, and we don’t get to see what happens next. He always knew there was something more out there, but he doesn’t share it with anyone, not even the audience. Disclosure Day is therefore not only an aggrandizement, but a sort of corrective to Close Encounters: this time, he’s saying, I recognize it’s my duty to bring you all with me.
But again: where are we going? What is this revelation we’re supposed to be collectively initiated into? It’s something we have to see, that can’t be explained. That’s why Dr. Kellner is determined to get a trove of secret recordings broadcast on TV, with the help of an uncomprehending weathergirl, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), who’s been basically possessed by alien knowledge (one of many goofy details in a pretty goofy script). Screens and interfaces are essential to the visual language: Spielberg is constantly playing with reflections, on TVs, computers, in mirrors, and on panes of glass, often using them to skillfully shift between the observed and the observer within a single shot. The world is built out of visual interfacing, he insists. And this is maybe an odd historical moment for this insistence: the explosion of AI technology has forced us all to be less confident in images as a guarantor of reality (the paranoid idea that everything can be explained by a grand coverup, on the other hand, is timelier than ever).
So let’s play close attention to what happens on the screens, when we finally see some of these secreted videos. While the story (by Spielberg and David Koepp) toys lightly with the religious implications of extraterrestrial life, the immediate horror that spectators seem to experience when exposed to these powerful images does not appear to be generated by a crisis of faith. Nor is it fear of the foreign creatures themselves, who (it seems to be taken for granted) evidently mean us no harm. We’re horrified, instead – and remarkably! – by the aliens’ mistreatment. By their suffering.
It is important and good that Spielberg depicts his extraterrestrials as The Greys, the classic archetype of aliens from Cold War-era American mythology: by doing so, he is clearly engaging with a rich vein of folkloric tradition. There are many theories as to why people prone to alien sightings have settled upon this classic archetype, but one of the most compelling is that the scrawny, knobby beings, with swollen heads and bellies, uncannily resemble the victims of starvation. They are symbolic sufferers, famine-riddled Third Worlders, the mostly-unseen victims of the current global order, relegated to a back room of our deep, disordered subconscious, erupting in night terrors and moments of sleep paralysis.
But Spielberg’s images – grainy black-and-white footage of uniformed soldiers placing these emaciated cadavers and gaping, gaunt survivors onto stretchers – resembles something even more specific: the Holocaust. He has basically recreated those traumatizing reels from the American liberation of the concentration camps, just with dubious CGI.
Perhaps the great, repressed secret is simply this: suffering is all around us, and we are implicated in it. This provides us with an interesting possible reinterpretation of the phrase: “we are not alone.” Is this insight really the transcendent gift that would be messianically imparted unto us through art? Maybe? Does the movie accomplish that? Not really? Maybe that’s why I want to label it “cocky” rather than “ambitious”: it announces the ability to do something it doesn’t.
Disclosure Day isn’t bad. There’s a whiz-bang action sequence with a car stuck to a train that’s a real nail-biter, and it does something rare for Spielberg: it spares us the overbearing musical score. The director’s biggest weakness is for insecure emotional bullying, using John Williams as a bludgeon, so it’s a treat to see him lay off the sauce for once in his life. Also, Emily Blunt’s performance kind of rules. She plays a ditzy caricature of a Midwestern scatterbrain, and her obvious enthusiasm successfully bridges the gap between the broad comedy of her terribly-written character (as sort of purple-aura empath zapped with preposterous telepathy) and the humanity of her presence.
But Josh O’Connor is wretched. He’s currently competing with Pedro Pascal for the title of Guy Who’s in Everything Now Even Though He Always Kind of Sucks. His unceasing and ludicrous attempts to display inner turmoil on his face (rather than trying to act) is endlessly obnoxious and never for a second relatable.
This is – to resume, I guess – an all-over-the-place grab-bag of latter-day Spielbergisms, occasionally thrilling, almost always silly, and sometimes dispiritingly drab. But its saving grace is the final word. Does the Maestro realize he never truly produced the kind of moving pictures he imagined would liberate us? Does he express doubt that he ever truly did raise us ignorant sufferers up from off the bloodied mat? Does he show humility, perhaps? Maybe. Because when he abandons his precious images, he decides to leave us with this final, contradictory direction: “Listen.”