Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s New Aliens, and A Riveting Plea for Empathy

This essay contains spoilers for Disclosure Day. To read our non-spoiler review of—and a different perspective on—this film, visit this page.

You never really get a chance to get used to Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. Rather than any sort of expository restraint, opening credits, or any patience for worldbuilding, you’re thrown straight into the rocketing plot of an espionage thriller—and directly into the fist of a wrestler. It’s a deeply fascinating first image for the latest film in the modern master’s filmography, and, especially for his first in over two decades, to have returned to his well-trodden territory of aliens and the extraterrestrial. The wrestling match that opens Disclosure Day winds up being more set dressing than symbolically charged device, but it’s an excellent tone-setter nonetheless. For a film that directly portrays the battle over whether we should blindside and confront the public with a colossal truth, it helps to see the first-person perspective of a man being repeatedly hit in the face before getting slammed down onto the floor of the ring to uproarious applause.

Up until now, Spielberg’s conception of the extraterrestrial has largely been predicated on notions of how we contend with the unknown. 2005’s War of the Worlds was a harrowing post-9/11 text that updated H.G. Wells’ seminal alien-invasion text to an apocalyptic extent; a harrowing portrayal of aliens dead-set on nothing but the extermination of human life as it stands. On the more enchanting side, we have Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extraterrestrial—the former sets its targets on modes of communication, and the latter focuses more on discovery and youthful adventure. Disclosure Day operates on a different kind of premise entirely, a shift in Spielberg’s attitude towards the hypothetical of alien life… in that to him, alien life has stopped being a hypothetical or an unknown to contend with.

Indeed, Disclosure Day‘s main source of mystery never lies in the existence of aliens. As we find out via Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor)—the former cybersecurity specialist of Wardex, a government-sanctioned data collection company—we’ve been in contact with aliens ever since the Roswell Incident of 1947, in which an extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed straight into New Mexico. He shows this information to his girlfriend, Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), immediately after a narrow escape from Wardex and their chief, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), at the wrestling match in question. Hiding in an abandoned house, Daniel unfurls a series of files on his laptop, directly in front of Jane’s eyes. There, she learns that in the decades since Roswell, the government experimented on and abused living alien life forms (the bug-eyed Greys of long-circulated conspiracies and rumors), and used Wardex to classify the information tightly. The mission, as Daniel explains it, is “full disclosure”—total revelation of all of this information to the general public in a single go.

Steven Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp unfold various other threads in the periphery, all the while. The most important of them is that of Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City weather reporter with aspirations of becoming a full anchor in her own right. The same day that Daniel and Jane escape Wardex’s grasp, Margaret has a spontaneous encounter with a cardinal the morning before work that suddenly causes her knowledge base to expand. She starts speaking Russian to her husband without any hesitation. While at the news station, as they’ve brought in a South Korean ambassador to explain why North Korea’s internal destabilization is about to bring the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust, she starts speaking Korean to translate.

All this happens in a flurry of uncontainable, tour-de-force hyperactivity. Information flows out of Margaret that she didn’t know she had, while she has to take every preparatory step to get ready to go on-air, while being several minutes late for work. Spielberg films this entire sequence alone in utterly breathless long takes that immediately show the height of Blunt’s performing abilities—which only proceed to get more impressive from here.

As she’s on air, one final language emerges from Margaret. It’s an inexplicable alien tongue that Daniel can intuitively understand, that Wardex immediately hears about, and that former Wardex director of biological assets, Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), immediately begins a mysterious project for. The collision of all these threads makes up the two-day-long story of Disclosure Day, structured like a ruthless pursuit to a finish line with no return, and it makes for Spielberg’s most fascinating treatise thus far on the literal power of empathy.

Disclosure Day is a film constantly on edge, restless in both its momentum and in the breadth of subject matter it wants to cover. It becomes readily clear soon enough that the 79-year-old Spielberg is staring down the twilight hours of both his life and career with some retrospective graveness. Where else would the autobiographical recountings of The Fabelmans have emerged from, or his musical return to tragic sociopolitical polemic with his West Side Story remake? Never mind, of course, that the great Tony Kushner was the scribe behind those, among countless others of Spielberg’s contemporary works. More specifically, though, is he wondering what kind of message he wants to leave last with his films? Is he doing a victory lap across the most celebrated thematic corner of his filmography by venturing once more into the alien?

Who can know the mind of Steven Spielberg? The only clear indicator lies in the text of Disclosure Day itself, and in the noteworthy fact that its final uttered word is “Listen.” Our two protagonists themselves have been outfitted with the supernatural ability to listen to incomprehensible territory—the minds and lives of others, as well as the mathematical order of the universe. The “devices” that drive forward the plot of the story, misused by Scanlon to control the minds of others (and which also possess invisibility properties, to boot), are also visible in multitudes pointed directly at the young Margaret and Daniel’s heads in the moments of their traumatic, ability-granting abductions. Through them emerged Margaret’s omniscient polyglot literacy, and Daniel’s ability to comprehend her alien utterings, implied to be a language spoken in mathematical arrangements. Whatever the aliens are on Earth for, in Spielberg’s view, is likely predicated on empathetic connection beyond our human abilities.

It’s interesting to consider, therefore, the fact that Steven Spielberg sets Disclosure Day on the brink of World War III but never grandly gesticulates in its direction. Government officials visiting Wardex’s offices bring it up; shops and gas stations are raided by civilians in hoarding masses not unlike the onset of the COVID pandemic; the news broadcasts that abound within this film are constantly talking about it within their headlines. Ultimately, the plot about the aliens and the disclosure of the information in Wardex’s possession constantly takes priority, bending the nigh-apocalyptic state of the world around the implications of these secrets’ public release. Will humanity unite under the confirmed knowledge that help is, in fact, coming to save us from ourselves—help that comprehends definitions of empathy beyond those of the pale blue dot?

Not all of it functions airtightly, of course. One gets the impression that Disclosure Day was a film that Spielberg made with great urgency, a film pushed along the production timeline with the same kind of restlessness that drives its story. For instance, the intersections of the film’s alien-centric story and its questions of religious faith, centered around Jane and the convent she was raised in, are juxtaposed visually, most pointedly in a match-cut between the cross Jane uses to wake herself up from Scanlon’s mind control, and the device Scanlon uses to trap her within it. That’s not to mention, of course, the utterly chilling moment where Scanlon looks utterly demonic, his cerulean eyes glowing amid dim, sickly lighting, emphasizing the shadows in his features—a testament to cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s abilities. Those juxtapositions end there, left half-baked and under-explored to their fullest extent, as the nuns are sidelined and Jane winds up needing to mostly vanish from the plot for Daniel’s safety.

And what of the unquestioning presentation of broadcast media as the medium of disclosure, amid an era confined so completely by both corporate influence on news media, as well as the whims of social media and the bubbles it’s trapped us in? Steven Spielberg may have constructed, in a sense, the anti-Eddington, a film that wants to believe in an unimpeachable truth believable by all the denizens of the Earth, but skeptical minds of Ari Aster’s cloth are likely to dismiss the notion as totally unbelievable outright. Indeed, a certain amount of optimistic suspension of disbelief is certainly required to convince oneself of Disclosure Day‘s thesis as it applies to the state of our world, siloed off into irreconcilable realities by the technological and oligarchical entities that have designed our world this way. But even still, the means through which Spielberg gets to a thematic point of hope, as well as his clever incorporation of the empathetic raison d’etre of the aliens’ arrival, is likely to take emotional and narrative priority for some. This film believes deeply in a world where a unifying truth can speak to all of us—and it’s not smarmy or disingenuous about that belief in any way.

Ultimately, in the areas of Disclosure Day‘s most vested interest, it’s an artifact of great fascination, heightened formal achievement. Dynamic framings have frankly never looked better, and there is sheer enchantment that no other director is equipped to provide. Now would feel like a good time for Steven Spielberg to entertain the apocalypse. Now especially seems like the right time for him to refuse that call. At the utterly stirring final stretch of this film, Margaret gets the anchor spot she always wanted. Daniel’s preservation of the drives in his possession finally pays off. Scanlon submits to his defeat, but only because Margaret helped him glimpse the life and family that either he left behind, or left him behind in turn. Humanity’s first glimpse at alien life is not one of hostility, but of a last-ditch effort to awaken us beyond the self-destructive solipsism of our species. To the extent that Disclosure Day is, in fact, one of the final statements left behind by one of our final surviving cinematic masters, it’s a cry for kindness borne of purely earnest intention.