Disclosure Day

UK Release Date. 10 June 2026
Certification. 12A
Running Time. 2 hours 25 mins
Director. Steven Spielberg
Cast. Emily Blunt, Colman Domingo, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Josh O'Connor.
Rating. 61%

Review.

Steven Spielberg has a long and, some may say, checkered relationship with science fiction; from the seminal Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977) and E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982), to the largely underrated A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Minority Report (2002), and finally to the underwhelming War Of The Worlds (2005) and the egocentric, corporate maelstrom of Ready Player One (2018).

In Disclosure Day, Spielberg, once again, looks to the stars. Not with fear, but with something akin to rapture. However, despite some impressive sequences and an intriguing central premise, the veteran director’s return to science fiction never quite reaches the transcendent heights of his best genre work.

The existence of extraterrestrial life is unambiguously confirmed by the end of the first act. But first contact is no longer as harmonious as a five-note call-and-response. Instead, Dr Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) and KCXE meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) are intent on full disclosure - a whole century of crash landings and cover-ups.

The initial portion of Disclosure Day is identifiably the work of a sharp and tightly focused Spielberg, but the plot hinges on a flat pack reconstruction of a childhood home. It is here that the vapid Spielberg schmaltz takes centre stage, and the film draws weary on muscle memory. The more sentimental the film gets and the more John Williams’ score all but begged for the audience's tears, the less I enjoyed the proceedings.

Although Emily Blunt delivers a strong performance as the meteorologist Margaret Fairchild, none of the principal characters neither register nor stick in the mind in the way Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind did. Rather than real, indelible, well-defined characters, these are two-dimensional creations - moving parts voided of depth so as to be positioned in the storyline at strategic points. The clumsiness with which Spielberg (and screenwriter David Koepp) leap from one subplot to another is dreadful. Contrast the cumbersome pacing of Disclosure Day with that of Jurassic Park, in which the duo seamlessly interweaved the characters’ disparate adventures.

The film’s climax unveils a myriad of hitherto concealed extra-terrestrial footage, but - like the characters - the audience experiences it through newsroom monitors, television screens and mobile phones. The commentary on our technology-saturated world is obvious, but there’s an inadvertent, disappointing lack of immediacy to this stylistic choice. It’s simultaneously too much and too little. I want to witness the confirmation of alien life up close and personal, not by looking over someone’s shoulder as they watch it on their mobile phone on the subway commute home.

In between, Spielberg demonstrates that he still has what it takes. The film works best when the director gets to show off his flair for staged action set pieces. None more so than a sequence involving a half-crushed car and a speeding freight train; an exhilarating, transportive sequence reminiscent of Spielberg in his prime. For a few glorious minutes, my mind was solely focused on how Daniel and Margaret were going to escape. Nothing else mattered.

One of the film’s interesting philosophical subplots concerns faith. If aliens do exist, what becomes of God? Is a divine entity actually superfluous? This intriguing premise is worked out a bit too neatly by Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), who proclaims that God wouldn’t be so selfish as to let all that vast space go to waste. Clearly, the Mother Superior is familiar with the work of US astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan, "The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space."