It’s Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor on the run from Colin Firth in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi thriller, Disclosure Day. Here’s our review: No one else but Steven Spielberg could have made Disclosure Day. Not just because of its subject matter – this being the latest in a line of the director’s UFO-related movies which also ... Disclosure Day review | Steven Spielberg returns to the saucer age
It’s Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor on the run from Colin Firth in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi thriller, Disclosure Day. Here’s our review:
No one else but Steven Spielberg could have made Disclosure Day. Not just because of its subject matter – this being the latest in a line of the director’s UFO-related movies which also includes Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, War Of The Worlds and Firelight, the largely-lost piece he made as a teenager.
No, Disclosure Day is quintessentially Spielbergian in its pace, flow, and sheer good-heartedness. This is the work of an un-cynical filmmaker who’s never lost his childlike sense of wonder – and who can find uplift even in the darkest of subject matters, from The Color Purple to Amistad to Schindler’s List to Munich. And, whether you believe in alien visitors or not, his fascination with the subject matter is seldom less than infectious.
In an age where we’re hard-wired to almost reflexively doubt just about everything we see, read and hear, Spielberg’s guilessness feels almost, well, alien.
Let’s keep the story bit of this review as broad-strokes as possible. Josh O’Connor plays Daniel, a cybersecurity worker at a secretive organisation who’s stolen valuable information that he wants to reveal to the world; Colin Firth plays his boss, Scanlon, who wants that information back. It’s a conspiracy that harks back to Close Encounters and its secretive government research into the UFO phenomenon, and once again, it’s through (more-or-less) ordinary people that we see the thriller plot unfold.
That plot flips between Daniel, on the run from Scanlon’s black saloon-driving agents with his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), and Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas TV weather presenter who begins exhibiting strange, potentially career-ruining behaviour one day after breakfast. She ends up on her own roadtrip with her nice-guy musician boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), while a mysterious chap named Hugo (Colman Domingo, with a mobile phone earpiece permanently strapped to his head) tries to help the protagonists stay a step ahead of Scanlon’s clutches.
Assisted by his regular cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg orchestrates some fluent action set-pieces, his camera swooping and diving with the scrapes and collisions as eloquently as John Williams conducts his score.
There are moments involving cars and trains that evoke memories of the Spielberg classics – including a moment of grinding metal and sheer panic that recalls a sequence in Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade. Spielberg may be over 50 years into his film career, but he can still compose and shoot a set-piece like few other directors currently working.
Not that you should go into Disclosure Day expecting some sort of huge summer thrill-ride. Rather, it’s a comparatively intimate story about a group of people searching for answers. Or, to put it even more basically, it’s an opportunity for Spielberg to explore the current state of the UFO (or UAP) phenomenon, which has evolved somewhat since Richard Dreyfuss went on his own voyage of discovery in 1977.
It’s a flying saucer flick for the 21st century, with references to, among many other bits of UFO lore, the fighter jet footage released by the Pentagon in 2020 (a moment that inspired Spielberg to make the film). The title itself is a reference to the relatively new disclosure movement and its belief that we’re building towards a moment where the long-concealed truth about aliens will finally be revealed.
Screenwriter David Koepp descends into long speeches here and there, but these are matched by moments of real human warmth, ably performed by a roundly terrific cast. The standout is Emily Blunt, who brings a natural likeability to Margaret, and effortlessly pulls off the moments where Koepp takes us into playful, sometimes spooky Twilight Zone territory.
Josh O’Connor brings a similar commitment to Daniel, who’s haunted by the discoveries he’s made and fixed in his belief that humanity has the right to know the truth. Of the film’s talkiest stretches, these discussions are the most thought-provoking; to paraphrase a film that has nothing to do with flying saucers, can we handle the truth? Or will proof that we aren’t alone drive us all out of our tiny minds?
Spielberg leaves us in little doubt as to his position on the subject, and once that becomes clear, his characters have a tendency to feel like pieces being moved around on a game board, with some quietly removed from the picture once they’ve completed their assigned task. And, if there’s bleakness to be found in Disclosure Day at all, it’s the sentiment that our species is so distrustful, territorial and hooked on violence that we need a higher power to save us from ourselves.
If that sounds quasi-religious, then there’s a thread of that running right through Disclosure Day (much as there is in quite a few American science fiction movies, thinking about it). There’s a hint of the faith discussions in Robert Zemeckis’s Contact, joined by the romance-on-the-run feel of John Carpenter’s Starman, and a hint of the Cold War tension that underscored James Cameron’s The Abyss.
Comparisons will inevitably be drawn with Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Looked at with a cold, harsh eye, Disclosure Day feels smaller, somehow, than that 1977 film, even as it deals with similarly weighty questions about our place in the universe. It could also be said that Spielberg doesn’t craft a shot as awe-inspiring here as he did with photographer Vilos Zsigmond all those years ago; John Williams puts in some lovely work (especially in those action sequences), but doesn’t produce anything as immediately iconic as that five-note melody he came up with for Close Encounters.
Even having written all this, Spielberg remains one of the few filmmakers who’s capable of making us feel what his characters feel. Some film theorists call it haptic cinema: the ability to create the texture and tangible quality of an object or situation through visuals and sound. There’s one moment in particular where Daniel attempts to talk Margaret through a panic attack; he convinces her to touch the strings on a piano, and it’s almost possible to feel the tension of the wire in our own hands. It’s an extraordinary skill that Spielberg has always had and few can replicate.
It’s only matched by his uncanny ability to rush us through a busy scene, people talking across one another and the camera swooping back and forth, and make it feel irresistible rather than merely confusing. Watching Spielberg working at full bore is like witnessing an expert lacemaker or a virtuoso musician. It’s all such exquisite craftsmanship.
Nor is Spielberg trying to play the old hits here, or return to past glories like so many filmmakers are tempted to do in the later stages of their careers. He appears to have returned to the UFO realm because he genuinely believes that the truth is being kept from us. In this sincerity, Spielberg harks back to a time before his own career, and a film like Robert Wise’s The Day The Earth Stood Still from 1950.
That film was also about the need for humanity to be shaken out of its belligerence by a world-changing event. Like most sci-fi films from the 50s, Dislosure Day’s sincerity may seem almost quaint to some. But therein lies its uniqueness – perhaps even, in an untidy sort of way, its brilliance. This is a film that, for all its flaws, only Spielberg could have made. We’re unlikely to see anything quite like it again.
Disclosure Day is in UK cinemas from the 12th June 2026.
