Review: Disclosure Day
What if it was Dis-bro-sure Day and it was just for the fellas?
It’s sort of difficult in 2026 to pick any one looming threat to cinema as an art form or movies as an industry that’s distinct enough from the crowd to be worthy of a Sword of Damocles allegory here. If anything, being a film freak these days is rather like having dinner under an entire chandelier of swords looming over your head, all of them tenuously secured to the ceiling and heavy enough to pop you like a water balloon full of red paint. AI. Studio mergers. A climate of boring risk-aversion. Dropping attention spans. A dodgy macroeconomic climate generally. I can keep going.
However, one sword in particular that’s looking more and more threatening all the time is the imminent retirements or deaths of the twentieth century’s master filmmakers. These men are not just artists of immense skill, renown, and commercial reputation, they serve as a conscience and a grounding, moderating force in an industry which grows to resemble the casino atmosphere of modern America more with each passing day. Without wishing to engage in any soapbox talk about the need to preserve history over profit and artistic heritage over economic efficiency, it is pretty worrying, to me, anyway, that most of the people qualified to take meaningful moral stands in defense of the art form are men in their seventies and eighties. Men like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and, of course, Steven Spielberg.
I suppose I could go around the horn with the standard “you-may-know-him-from” IMDB skim and paraphrase here but more so than in any other edition of this review column so far; it feels roundly pointless. He’s Steven Spielberg, a name practically synonymous with successful blockbuster filmmaking. He made Jaws when he was twenty-six and has spent the fifty years since leaving an unequaled legacy in American pop-culture. It could be argued, perhaps, that the great man has been diminished somewhat in the past decade (don’t jump me Fabelmans gang) as he’s shifted more into producing and emerges only for the odd passion project. But the mark of a true hitmaker is that they’re only ever one project away from being back on top, and with a return to the thriller mode which has served him so well, Disclosure Day seemed set to remind us all who the real king of movies is.
A film critic acquaintance of mine, Eli Friedberg, (read him in Slant and The Film Stage) called Disclosure Day “Spielberg’s Megalopolis” after attending an early screener. This got me excited because I am an avowed defender of the aforementioned Mister Coppola’s widely-lampooned rich old guy “Change Da World” freakpiece. It’s not brilliant, but it’s fun! I know in this age of gerontocracy we chafe against the alleged wisdom of the oldsters but there can be a certain sublime quality that an accomplished creative can only access once they start seeing the reaper in the mirror.
I fear my buddy Eli and I miscommunicated.
He didn’t mean Disclosure Day was Megalopolis in the way I liked. He meant it in the other way. I’ve written five-hundred words so far to avoid facing the fact that this thing is by any metric disappointing. No joy in Mudville. Mighty Spielberg has struck out.
Disclosure Day is let down from the jump by its marketing. Trailers hinted at a return to the conspiracy-heavy American crack-up mode of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The actual film is a fairly standard chase thriller, mostly cribbing from Minority Report if you want a Spielberg comp.
A cybersecurity expert (Josh O’Connor) in the employ of an organization tasked with containing and exploiting alien artifacts and life forms on Earth has absconded with the entire treasure trove of video evidence he’s meant to be protecting. Going on the lam with his girlfriend in tow (Eve Hewson, Bono’s daughter) and barely a half step ahead of his former boss (Collin Firth in a pretty intriguing villainous turn, more meat on that bone I reckon). With a rogue faction of the organization (led by Colman Domingo in a more respectable addition to his Year of Getting That Check than Michael was), they plan a disclosure of the material, all of it, inviting debate over whether humanity is ready for these truths and reflection on how it might affect our perception of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. Oh, also World War 3 may be breaking out. It’s not well established or elaborated on.
There’s certainly some things to like here. Spielberg is seventy-nine years old and still directing circles around the industry. He will simply never lose his touch in that regard. It’s a real indictment of modern blockbuster filmmaking that even in a minor effort like this, Spielberg’s camera feels so much more alive. The old men continue to dominate this field simply because the younger guys, whether out of sloth, ignorance, or fear of spooking some boss, have lost touch with the fundamentals that have always lent the cinematic medium an ability to thrill and astound. If Spielberg ever follows through on that remake of Bullitt he’s been threatening, I’ll be there, ready to forgive and forget.
Special mention is due to Emily Blunt, who’s easily the best performer in this cast. Playing a career-frustrated Kansas City weatherwoman who begins manifesting empathic powers of insight, communication, and clairvoyance seemingly at random, she’s asked to take a big swing, omniscient and overwhelmed at once, and absolutely nails it. Early Oscar buzz may bear fruit. It’s almost a shame Marvel never got the X-Men under the big tent because she’s playing maybe the best Jean Grey ever put on film, complete with redhead dye job.
The other thread of this plot, however, the one I summarized, is doing less well. A lot less. Josh O’Connor is as bad as I’ve yet seen him here, seeming totally out of synch with both the direction and the material and Eve Hewson gets it even worse. Frankly she’s more a victim of David Koepp’s genuine stinker of a script here than anyone else in this cast. The onetime scribe of Jurassic Park and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man has been pitching more and more of those lately, but frankly I don’t know if I can even blame him. This is allegedly Spielberg’s passion project, these are his ideas and fixations, and they’re embarrassingly underbaked.
There are thematic thrulines I find interesting, but they’re interesting because of who is saying them, not how (Blunt being the exception). There’s some insufferable high-school grade religious anxiety about how we may feel our own place in creation, knowing we share it with intelligence beyond our world. There’s an overwritten but competently acted exchange of philosophies between Firth’s cynical company man and Domingo’s idealistic free-thinker. But the one I keep coming back to is a kind of unspoken chiding of middle America. There’s a kind of sickness of the spirit shot through Disclosure Day’s America, mostly the midwest. An unspoken sense that we’ve all grown cloistered and self-involved, unable to confront the big problems and face the unknown. This is, on its face, somewhat compelling. Spielberg took the Americana of his youth and sold it worldwide. Our great media prophet growing disgusted with the heartland is the exact sort of moral judgement I spoke of artists of his authority as having the unique authority to render. Blunt’s character works so well because it communicates this so artfully, this accomplished, well-compensated, materially comfortable sort of woman who cannot be content, cannot feel at home and happy because of some ineffable missing thing which she can’t help but pursue. The sudden unraveling of her life by forces beyond her understanding is a kind of euphoria, simply because that need to strive, to be more, is finally silent. She’s content to buy the ticket and take the ride, but the destination disappoints.
Spielberg may have a diagnosis but no treatment. Like so many of his generational cohort, the solutions he proposes for our national malaise feel stuck in the twentieth century, his century. The final act of Disclosure Day is the worst thing any film seeking to make a statement can be: a meme. Already it is being metabolized, reconfigured into meaninglessness, and will soon be gone, nothing, vapor. The great man has not lost his touch. He’s just lost touch. I fear that may be worse.
I rate this movie two North Korean smart phones out of five
Add to that "the existence of aliens will stop WWIII" crackpot boomer fantasy. Maybe this would work if aliens existed as a credible threat, like if, say, a giant psychic squid fell on Manhattan and killed 3 million people in a single instant. That's a threat that can bring people together to stop a war. But a breaking news bulletin that aliens exist and their main power is being really empathetic? I'm pretty sure that's not even spicy enough to take people's attention off the Epstein files.
Disappointment indeed. But still entertaining.
I agree with everything in your review. Even though Emily Blunt was by far the best performer on the movie, I feel the script would’ve made more sense if her character’s empathy powers were given to the ex-nun instead? Have Blunt play the ex-nun and don’t cast Bono’s daughter at all, and that would’ve also added more of a connection between her and Josh O’Connor’s character, along with more opportunities to emphasize some themes that barely get touched upon otherwise