So I caught Steven Spielberg’s new movie Disclosure Day on Thursday, its opening day in my neck of the woods. With all the hype worthy of a Spielberg movie drop it begins with a wrestling match in which the camera is alternatively perched on the wrestler being pounded or thrown in the air and the crowd scenes, focusing on one morose fellow with a conspicuous backpack. I was thinking terrorist plot at that point. A trio of black-clad government operatives surround the guy and, as usual with movie magic, somehow he gets away. But he’s not a domestic (or international) terrorist in the conventional sense. He’s more of a whistleblower. Think Edward Snowden. Think government secrets of the profound variety.
From that wrestling-match opening sequence it barrels headlong into plots and subplots full of mystery, bad guys in black governmental SUVs hurtling down roads to catch or kill the good guys, and several amusing moments that involve what most people would call “super powers”: Emily Blunt suddenly breaks into Polish/Russian while speaking to her boyfriend, and when one government goon touches an interstellar object with a glove, he explodes. It’s fun and fast-paced. I don’t know if it’s particularly profound, although the ending implies a reckoning with cosmic reality. It ends with one verb that the UFO-naysayers generally refuse to do.
As Spielberg is 79 years old, he may be nearing the Swan Song part of his career, and Disclosure Day plays into that era nicely. It’s best appreciated as a kind of bookend to his classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), with touches of E.T. (1982) and War of the Worlds (2005). Personally I’d suggest less chase scenes and more aliens, but what do I know. Emily Blunt does a terrific job as a TV weatherwoman Margaret Fairchild, who is somehow linked to conspiracies and extraterrestrials in ways she doesn’t understand, while Josh O’Connor plays Dr. Daniel Kellner, a techie supergeek who mumbles and stumbles his way through the movie, a kind of Everyman for conspiracy theory buffs. Lastly the charming Brit Colin Firth plays the bad guy, Noah Scanlon, who is trying to keep secrets and will do anything to anyone who gets in his way.
As a UFO enthusiast but reluctant skeptic, it’s all pretty fascinating to me. The recent documentary The Age of Disclosure (2025) provides plenty of fuel for ufologists who insist all the theories are real and should be believed, essentially that our government has proof of alien existence, including spacecraft and “biologics” (which, we assume, implies Dead Alien Bodies). That the government is now releasing UFO files makes it all the more timely and relevant. Will this fictional movie convince anyone that “The truth is out there”? Should it? Probably not. But many people believe we are on the cusp of a grand “disclosure,” from the government most likely, that will change our thinking about aliens and UFOs. Like many (if not most), I’ll believe when I see it, when reputable scientists can examine said alien spacecraft and/or bodies. Once we enter a realm where the hard evidence of alien encounters is indisputable, we’ll no doubt look back on Spielberg’s films as prescient and visionary. For now, it’s a lot of fun.
