Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | June 16, 2026
Nearly two hours into the two-hour-and-35-minute Disclosure Day, I was already composing my lede in my head — something about how even our most celebrated directors eventually run out of magic and hit a wall. Cameron Crowe did it with Elizabethtown and Aloha. The late, great Rob Reiner had a masterful run of films in the ’80s and ’90s nearly matched, point for point, by a run of terrible ones in the aughts. Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone haven’t made a decent film in 25 years.
Has it finally happened to Steven Spielberg? That was mostly what was running through my mind during the first two hours of Disclosure Day, which is a technically serviceable film — emphasis on technically. It’s still Spielberg: He can frame a shot and shoot a chase sequence in his sleep. But the whole thing felt bereft of new ideas. It’s basically just a chase film, and Spielberg kept the mystery hidden in the trailers mostly because the mystery isn’t that interesting.
Here’s the first two hours in a nutshell: Josh O’Connor plays Dr. Daniel Kellner, an employee of Wardex, a kind of government-adjacent organization that holds all of Earth’s secrets about extraterrestrial life. He steals some alien tech and a cache of classified files with the intention of disclosing everything to the world. His girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), gets dragged along as Wardex — and the man running it, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) — spends most of the film trying to hunt them down. Noah also uses the alien tech to occasionally slip inside Jane’s mind and track their whereabouts.
Meanwhile, Emily Blunt plays Margaret Fairchild, a weather reporter who inexplicably develops the ability to connect with other humans — read their minds, understand their language, empathize deeply. (The alien power is admittedly vague.) Daniel, for his part, can also understand alien language because he speaks the universal language of math.
For two hours, it really is just a long, laborious series of chases as Noah tries to run down Daniel, Jane, and Margaret. They’re not even fun chases — it’s the kind of thing where 20 armed operatives are trying to find Daniel and he’s hiding ten feet away behind a bush. Meanwhile, a man named Hugo (Colman Domingo) is coordinating things behind the scenes, somehow knowing — for reasons that are never adequately explained — that Daniel and Margaret will eventually find each other.
And they do. At an old abandoned warehouse where Hugo has reconstructed Margaret’s childhood home so she can recall what we eventually learn is her and Daniel’s alien encounter — the moment the aliens gave them these powers to understand them. And their purpose, it turns out, is to … disclose the existence of the alien race to humanity. Oh, and the aliens are chill. They take the form of forest animals — deer, foxes — so as not to alarm anyone.
That’s the first 130 minutes. If the movie had ended there, it would have been a massive disappointment. It’s already a slog to sit through but I’d argue the last 25 minutes make it worth the trouble, because they finally establish some actual stakes.
And those last 25 minutes? Pure Spielbergian magic.
Daniel, Jane, and Margaret escape Wardex’s clutches and manage to air everything — 75 years’ worth of classified information about alien life on Earth. There are crashed ships, injured aliens, dead ones. It’s a lot to absorb.
But mostly, it works because of Courtney Grace, who plays the news anchor tasked with delivering all of this to the world — and who is, quite simply, goddamn phenomenal. She has the impossible job of revealing to humanity that we are not alone while simultaneously learning about it herself, on camera, in real time. She tries to maintain some modicum of professionalism, but she’s so overwhelmed that she can’t help but choke up at the sheer, staggering weight of the revelation. It’s sublimely effective. Spielberg genuinely captures what it might feel like for humanity to learn, all at once, that we are not alone in the universe, that aliens exist, and that they’re not here to kill us. There’s a lot to grapple with in that revelation, and somehow, Courtney Grace imparts all of it. It’s maybe the most straightforward sequence in the entire film — and also, by a wide margin, the most powerful.
It’s just Spielberg being Spielberg: impressing upon us what it might mean to learn that this vast, indifferent universe has other inhabitants. It’s sentimental as hell, and it’s hard not to get choked up — especially when it sometimes feels like we may be on the verge of making this same discovery in real life — but it flat-out works, and it makes the preceding two hours of chase-scene tedium worth sitting through just for this payoff. Nothing else in the movie may stick with you, but the image of Courtney Grace trying to process the unprocessable definitely will.
