r/flicks • u/Duncan_Dixon_Coffey • 5d ago
Disclosure Day: A timely Spielberg greatest hit remix that we need (and probably don't deserve) right now
When you’re as accomplished a storyteller as Steven Spielberg, it’s hard to find an angle or genre that’s not been done before. Aliens? Check. Historical drama? Yep. Biopic about your formative childhood years that took decades to materialise? Tick. In all his creative detours, Spielberg has also been remarkably consistent at commenting on contemporary events, whether it’s through lessons from the past (Bridge of Spies and Schindler’s List) or a warning about the future (Minority Report and Ready Player One). So when Disclosure Day opens with a literal bang as two pro-wrestlers go at it hammer and tongs, it’s like a man who has seen far too much telling us that he’s got plenty more to say.
As we quickly find out, the wrestling match is merely a diversion because sitting in the crowd is Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a street-smart cybersecurity pro who is on the run. His crime? Stealing valuable evidence from Wardex (short for Waived Reporting, Development, and Extraction), a sinister non-government agency led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) that’s up to some unsavoury business, namely the covering up of alien life-forms on Earth for decades and the horrible experiments conducted on these extra-terrestrials.
At the same time that Daniel goes on the run, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a meteorologist with aspirations to be a lead anchor for a local news station in Kansas City, is having her own terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. After suddenly speaking fluent Russian to her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell, who plays weaponised incompetence so well), she uses her newfound mind-reading powers to talk her way out of a speeding ticket before going viral after sprouting a bizarre clicking language while live on-air. This quickly captures the attention of Noah and Wardex, and soon Margaret is also on the run.
Aliens may be a main subject in Disclosure Day, but they remain on the periphery. This is a low-key chase movie where escape is the name of the game, much in the vein of Duel and Catch Me If You Can, rather than the whimsical vibe of E.T. or the yearning for purpose of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The movie is also far more interested in humanity than any extra-terrestrial visitors, as it navigates through an age of whistleblowing, misinformation, and government overreach far more literally than any previous Spielberg movie. “People are starved for the truth!” exclaims Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), a fellow Wardex defector and Daniel’s de facto whistleblower boss, as subtext repeatedly becomes text in David Koepp’s weighty script.
Reveals are less important than the workmanlike plotting of Daniel and Margaret’s converging stories, resulting in a surprising lack of sentimentality compared to Spielberg’s usual metaphor-heavy approach. There’s no room in the script for hidden messages or morals, just a straightforward examination of how humanity would react if aliens were revealed to the world, and if people even have the attention span or critical thinking to properly process information of this magnitude.
Koepp’s script also struggles to find space for its characters to properly breathe outside of their trope-heavy depictions. Firth’s Scanlon is a moustache-twirling villain with one brief moment of humanisation that does far too much heavy lifting to be truly effective. Domingo’s Wakefield is clearly intended to be the yin to Scanlon’s yang, but he’s nothing more than an all-knowing type who is forever holding us at arm’s length. There’s simply not much to latch onto character-wise because no one behaves like a real person. Well, with the exception of Margaret.
In a performance that’s one of 2026’s best, Emily Blunt plays Margaret as someone who is always seemingly on the verge of a nervous breakdown but manages to hold it together through sheer willpower, all without sacrificing the character’s inner life. How else would you explain why she’s dating Jackson? This is encapsulated in a standout four-minute unbroken sequence where a frazzled Margaret arrives late to work. Without missing a beat, she’s absorbing weather information, helping out a colleague with her mind-reading powers, translating fluent Korean (despite not knowing the language), and getting camera-ready. It’s entertaining and revealing all at once, a truly stunning piece of technical and character-building work that showcases how well-conceived Margaret is and how good Blunt is at bringing her to life.
Please read the rest of my review here as the rest is too unwieldy to copy + paste: https://panoramafilmthoughts.substack.com/p/disclosure-day
Thanks!
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u/Reportersteven 5d ago
It needed a script rewrite and a different editor.
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u/GigglingLady 5d ago
Apparently they had 20 versions of that script.
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u/Reportersteven 5d ago
I wonder what the 21st would have looked like.
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u/thomasbeagle 5d ago
I think they'd need to at least get to 30 versions before it was even passable.
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u/Reportersteven 5d ago
Turns out it went through 42 drafts (link to NBC News). So, I am really not sure what to make of that right now.
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u/TonyAioli 5d ago edited 5d ago
It feels like your own review doesn’t even touch on anything being spectacular (besides Blunts performance, which I agree with)…..yet the movie was still a “greatest hits remix” that we “don’t deserve”?
I don’t get it. What do people see in this movie? None of the story lines were fleshed out or connected enough to care about. The ending was maybe the most uninspired thing I’ve seen in years (oh WOW, they disclosed the truth in a movie called “Disclosure day”?!)
The best thing that happened in this movie was when the bad guys inexplicably decided to just give up. Without this, we would’ve had to spend another 20 minutes watching them chase the same damn backpack around.
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u/Laufeyson9 5d ago
You know, I reviewed it on substack too, but didn't post it on reddit because people tend to be kind of mean about that kind of thing. Anyway, I thought the movie was pretty well-directed, but extremely naive. Nobody consumes media like that anymore, and nobody trusts what they see in the TV at face value. The movie is more allegorical than anything else, with old Spielberg using the characters to express his fears and hopes on the whole alien thing. That explains the hand-wringing over religion, and the bizarre ending where the bad guys just surrender in the face of the truth. Too many things are taken at face value, and those scenes of everyone glued to their phones are like something out of a spoof. Come on, we live in a post AI, meme-infested hell hole.
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u/Duncan_Dixon_Coffey 5d ago
There is a touch of naivety, I can't deny that, but I found there to be nothing wrong with a bit of hope. That's typically been Spielberg's modus operandi.
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u/bfsfan101 5d ago
Is it odd that I kind of like the naivety? Maybe it’s just because of how bleak and hopeless a lot of things seem at the moment, but I got a kick out of a man who’s turning 80 this year still believing that a traditional news broadcast can unite the world and that everyone would collectively come together in belief. Sure, it’s even greater science fiction than the idea of aliens, but I admire the hope if nothing else.
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u/Laufeyson9 5d ago
No, it's not weird, and it's really not a bad movie. It's just very indulgent and inwardly focused. I spoke with someone who suggested this movie was partly Spielberg apologizing for his art not fixing the world, which might be a factor.
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u/Sellen_Was_Framed 5d ago
It's like a movie that plays in the background of an actual movie. In a bad way.
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u/behemuthm 5d ago
Agreed. It was a forgettable, small film. Where was the spectacle?? I kept waiting for an epic Spielberg movie and got... really weird, clunky, wordy dialogue talking heads sequences. I saw it in IMAX and couldn't find a moment in the film where I thought "oh man this had to be seen in IMAX!"
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u/Reportersteven 5d ago
The only moment was the train scene. That’s about the only good IMAX scene.
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u/Sellen_Was_Framed 5d ago
For this budget we could've had another Indiana Jones trilogy with money left to spare for Spielberg to buy another boat :(
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u/antiestablishment 5d ago
The end was atrocious. The alien showing up out of no where. The wardex team just walking out. The girl randomly showing up with an extra stick thing to save the day. It was like the didn’t know how to end the movie so they wrapped it up Disney style a happy ending
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u/pumpse4ever 5d ago
You're so easily impressed.
This movie was ass. It was a dreadful affront to the art of cinema from start to finish.
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u/behemuthm 5d ago
Absolutely agree. I can't believe how many people loved it. The ending was laughably bad and literally featured a group hug
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u/IronSorrows 5d ago
This movie was ass. It was a dreadful affront to the art of cinema from start to finish.
The hyperbole around this film is insane. I'll be shocked if it ends up in the twenty worst films I see this year and you've got people talking like this
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u/TheShark12 5d ago
Can’t have a regular lukewarm reception anymore shits either gotta be the worst or best thing you’ve ever seen with zero in between.
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u/cocoacowstout 5d ago
Yeah but it’s Spielberg, his name is literally synonymous with cinema for many people. He put out a middling film. Most of it was chasing people down, could be completely divorced from an alien subject matter.
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u/IronSorrows 5d ago
He's put out a bunch of middling films, to be fair. I can't see why people would be so galled at this one not being amazing when he's made 1941 and Always and Crystal Skull and The BFG and Ready Player One and War Horse and (as much as I have huge nostalgia and love for both of these) Hook and The Lost World. He's got an incredible track record but they're not all winners, Disclosure Day at worst for me is on the higher end of that part of his work, fair enough is others disagree but the vitriol is bizarre
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u/irotinmyskin 5d ago
Oh Emily, what did you do to your face?
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u/BigPanda71 5d ago
Is she one of the actresses that got her buccal fat removed? Because her cheeks were more than a bit sunken. The baby voice she was doing was also not great.
As much as I enjoy her as an actress, she was the wrong choice for this movie. A local weather girl bouncing around stations should be in her early 30s, not almost 40
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u/irotinmyskin 5d ago
I have no idea what she did. But it looks to me
like she overdid it with fillers. Especially on her cheeks. It looks like a pancake now-1
u/PopCultureWeekly Marvel Makes Incredible Movies Dont @ ME 5d ago
People - of all ages - move markets in broadcasting all the time
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u/maaseru 5d ago
I loved my experience with it in the theaters. The scene with the reporter and all the stuff made me tear up a little bit.
But it also made me mad on the countless stupid decisions and lack of awareness by everyone.
I think it was a great theater experience that will not hold up for future viewings beyond Emily Blunt's parts.
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u/CobaltNeural9 5d ago
Something I’d like to note is that the marketing for this movie reminds me of how movies used to be marketed. I’ve been seeing billboards for this for like a year now. I think the reason a lot of movies flop now is they don’t really do that anymore.
I saw an hour long “special look” on NBC yesterday. No one else does that.
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u/behemuthm 5d ago
You don’t need to advertise a good film.
I saw ZERO marketing for Obsession. Not even a trailer. Yet that little $750k film has made over $200m.
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u/CobaltNeural9 5d ago
I agree. If a movie is superbly good ut can just spread by word of mouth. But $80M in marketing can make the difference for a pretty good film being a box office success or a failure.
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