Disclosure Day Forgets to Phone Home

Disclosure Day

★ ½

Disclosure Day is the latest sci-fi adventure by director Steven Spielberg, who helped define a generation of alien movies with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Both Close Encounters and E.T. succeeded in opening the door to adults and kids alike to explore the possibility of other intelligent life within our universe. Close Encounters was a masterfully crafted, tension-filled adventure, while E.T. was a deeply emotional, sentimental film about a boy and his alien.

Emily Blunt as Margaret and Wyatt Russell as Jackson
© 2026 Amblin Entertainment / Universal Pictures

Here, Spielberg poses the question: can humanity handle the fully disclosed truth about aliens on our planet? Will entire systems of spiritual faith crumble? Will society as we know it fall into despair, chaos and ruin?

It’s a film in which the question is set up, and depending on how the ending strikes you, it really doesn’t have a satisfying payoff. In fact, for the first time after watching a Spielberg film, I left the theater irritated, frustrated and cheated by the experience. The movie didn’t deliver what it seemed to promise.

Emily Blunt as Margaret
© 2026 Amblin Entertainment / Universal Pictures

Emily Blunt plays meteorologist Margaret Fairchild, who gains the ability to speak other languages when a red cardinal lands on her kitchen table as she’s talking with her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell). During a live weather report, she becomes catatonic and speaks an otherworldly language that sounds like a combination of popping wet popcorn and someone choking on a chicken bone. Fortunately, Blunt’s acting skills go far beyond this, proving that a great actor can’t always save a film—even with a captivating performance.

Margaret knows things she shouldn’t, including where Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is as he tries to evade heavily armed Wardex security guards. Wardex is a contractor whose sole purpose is to keep government secrets locked away from the public and important government figures like the president of the United States. Daniel has dozens of USB drives with government data and a device that unleashes alien technology. That technology seems to appear only when the script needs it.

Josh O’Connor as Daniel and Eve Hewson as Jane
© 2026 Amblin Entertainment / Universal Pictures

Daniel’s job seems to be to run around the greater Kansas City area with his girlfriend, former Catholic nun Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), until a man named Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) is done building a two-story home in a warehouse somewhere across town.

Daniel does a lot of sneaking around these rent-a-cops, who are so inept they don’t notice him traipsing through crunchy fall leaves along the fence line of a farmhouse. They’re within earshot, and they don’t notice him until he hops in one of their squad cars and drives off.

There are three handheld alien devices, two of which have been stolen from Wardex. Daniel has one, Hugo has one and the head of Wardex, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), uses one to be in two places at once so he can have conversations with Jane in between chase scenes. Once he makes this connection through a CIA remote-viewing-type technique, something the film calls “diving in,” he can see where Jane is at any time.

Emily Blunt as Margaret and Josh O’Connor as Daniel
© 2026 Amblin Entertainment / Universal Pictures

The first hour of the film is intriguing, promising the sense-of-wonder journey Spielberg built his career on. While it never quite felt like this would be a new crowning achievement, there was a nice little alien action movie going on. And then the story became dull, thin and boring.

Still, we’re supposed to be heading to some epic climax, right? Right?

To be sure, if the film has one bright spot, it’s Blunt’s acting. She does her best with the material given. We can forgive her sounding like a popcorn popper in a dark misty swamp. She didn’t write the script, after all.

This may be the least of the film’s problems, but if you know your girlfriend is being psychologically tracked by the leader of Wardex, maybe don’t have her escape with the alien device he’s been trying to track down all along. Then again, the Wardex security team isn’t very good at its job. Maybe Daniel knows something we don’t, but it seems like a bad move to me. Just saying.

For a film about the world-changing power of revelation, Disclosure Day ends up revealing something much smaller: even Spielberg can build toward wonder and still leave us staring at the screen waiting for something else to happen. Or maybe I should follow Margaret’s advice and “listen” more.