Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is on the run after filling his backpack with highly classified and sensitive material from his job at the cybersecurity firm and US Government contractor, Wardex. Elsewhere, a local meteorologist, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), experiences a medical emergency live on air while delivering the morning weather. At the hospital, she becomes paranoid over a mysterious intuition that is telling her the doctors are working with the police to arrest her. She flees the hospital, following her intuition, which keeps telling her to seek out Kellner, a man she has never heard of or met.

Steven Spielberg returns to his roots of extraterrestrial themed filmmaking with Disclosure Day, a modern “what is out there” story which he broke to David Koepp who delivered the script. Released by Universal Pictures and running 145 minutes, the film opens at a breakneck clip and editor Sarah Broshar seldom eases up on the gas across its runtime allowing Spielberg to create something a thematic revue of his storied six decade career. In order to do this, he leans on a team of frequent collaborators, notably: composer John Williams who provides an orchestral score, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski who still employs the oft-aped lens flare reflecting off of a sleek blue color palate, and producer Kristie Macosko Krieger who helps make sure that this is unmistakable as as Steven Spielberg Picture by bringing all of these production heads back together again. Despite this below-the-line reunion, Disclosure Day does not feel rote as Spielberg challenges himself, along with casting director Cindy Tolan, to find a cast of all new-to-him actors that bring their own unique energy and style to the film.

The first act of the film deceptively frames O’Connor’s Kellner as the lead of the film; an argument that would hold up in court, but the writing sends him on an arc that is very unconventional for a leading action hero. He holds all of the answers in so far as the plot is concerned, and shortly after he and his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), a renounced nun, take shelter in a remote farmhouse, he reveals to her and to us that the stolen files contain decades worth of classified material concerning the US government’s interaction with extraterrestrial life. Their relationship is one of the frankest examinations of faith in Spielberg’s career that at times has promoted the idea of life beyond the stars and at other times – almost in all of his films – sought to uncover the morality and ethics of life here on earth. Spielberg merely scratches at this dichotomy and by the end of the film, he, unlike a divine power, does not allow his audience the free will which faith requires to answer the question of what is out there, but from his throne, directing the camera and the cast, he nevertheless fills his audience with awe.

Opposite O’Connor, and the sneaky star of the whole affair, is Blunt’s Margaret. Blunt is given an incredibly tall order as a character upon which the entire complicated and nuanced plot hinges while simultaneously playing a character left mostly in the dark. She presents an astonished frustration of a woman slowly losing control of her life in a way she does not understand as she speaks fluently in tongues which she does not know, and is telepathically in tune with the emotional struggles of those around her unlocking an incredible empathy. Given how the role is written on the page, in lesser hands this character would easily overwhelm a performer as it demands them to engage in a highwire act of being the conduit which the thesis of the film flows through while also having to take subtle actions that move the plot forward. Blunt walks that line adeptly, hindered only by a script that is a little long in the tooth that requires her to cycle back through a series of emotional moments and sequences as Margaret and Keller physically make their way from one set piece to the next.

Working backwards from a very personal memoir in The Fabelmans (2022) and then to a musical in West Side Story (2021), it has been a while since Spielberg has shown off his action filmmaking chops and in what can be considered a thematic capstone, he pulls out all the stops to deliver top tier action that can easily rival the current highwater mark set by Christopher McQuarrie’s helming of the later entries in the Mission Impossible franchise, and by some accounts, even exceeding those feats since Spielberg’s work here never crosses into the realm of excess and absurdity which McQuarrie’s stunts often do. With multiple car chases culminating in a wild firehouse sequence that scratches at memories of Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters (1984), the real crown jewel is Spielberg, finally nabbing the white whale which he’s has spent his career chasing: a jaw dropping train stunt around the midpoint of the film. Trains have long been associated with filmmaking being the subject of one of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s early shorts, to playing a pivotal role in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) which enthralled a young Spielberg and ignited in him a passion for cinema, so it is only right, then, that he gets to enter a train stunt of his own into the medium’s history. Train stunts can typically be broken into two categories, the more popular running a top the cars, or the running alongside parallel to the cars which often are just the opening gambit to a sequence that eventually evolves into rooftop chase. Here, Spielberg focuses entirely on the track level, and as the train goes rushing by, it is as if the horror of the train scene in Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986) – a film that is indebted to the style, tone, and wonder that Spielberg imbues his own films with – is extended, playing out in slow motion as car after car of this heavy freight train goes barreling by. The panic in Blunt’s performance here contributes to making this one of the best scenes of the film as she conveys a frantic desperation and a feeling that all hope is truly lost. While it may seem like the end of the line, from the safety of our recliner seats, we know that our heroes will escape, but that thought is drowned out by the racing train and unlike those fabled first audience members in a Lyon screening room, we lean forward towards the screen instead of running out of the auditorium.

Returning to the themes of faith, operating above Keller and Margaret, guiding and influencing their arc are two figures: Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the director of Wardex and Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), head of the biological division of Wardex and one of the chief defectors of the company. To transpose an angel/devil metaphor onto these characters is a bit of a stretch given the flows of the narrative, but the inclination to do so is certainly supported by the characters and their individual motivations. Scanlon’s goals, despite the biblical name and the shadings of an Elon Musk stand-in, are not shuttling the human race to a galactic base in a modern day arc, but rather just good old-fashioned power. He does so by wielding a strange alien artifact that allows him to tap into their powers similarly to how Margaret is able to hyper-navigate her surroundings. Scanlon sets his sights not on Keller or Margaret, but the more susceptible Jane, taking over her mind and influencing her thoughts, manipulating her so that he can get an insight into where she and Keller are hiding out. The possession tropes employed here are no accident, but Koepp’s script leaves Jane woefully underdeveloped especially given that she is the embodiment of trying to find a balance between science and faith. While Scanlon is clearly the antagonist of the film, Domingo’s Hugo is not as benevolent as the script would have us believe, especially on a thematic level.

Hugo is on the side of knowledge and the mastermind behind trying to get the truth to the people. To view this character from an avowed Jewish filmmaker through an admittedly Christian lens may not seem fully appropriate, but the is enough shared stories between the two faiths that the result remains the same. Much of Hugo’s work is left cloudy and at arm’s length from the audience – God works in mysterious ways, after all – and while we trust his motivations are altruistic simply because he is not Noah, like the snake in the Garden of Eden, he wants to lead humanity towards knowledge; not of good and evil, but of alien visitations here on Earth. Ultimately, though, this proves to be a benevolent act as the knowledge and culture of the alien race that has touched down on our planet is one rooted in compassion which is at the core of the Abrahamic faiths.

For the finale of Disclosure Day, the narrative is turned over to Courtney Grace, an NBC anchorwoman tasked with narrating the titular disclosure of the lifted Wardex files to the nation, and then the world. After two hours of nonstop chase sequences and some alien wonder, Spielberg slams on the breaks for a showstopping-in-its-quiet sequence. With his hooks in us, it is hard not to be swept up in the emotion and stunning awe of the news that is being revealed to us; decades worth of alien encounters in which at each instance, humanity has treated these visitors as something less than ourselves. To give our species the benefit of the doubt, perhaps we were acting out of fear, but the result was violence, and presented in this way, there are unmistakable allusions towards war reporting, and more specifically, genocide. Despite this, Spielberg’s inclinations to add an extra spoonful of sugar to his stories finally win out after a story that teeters into outright horror, and to see a world unified by this event – while admirable – seems too farfetched in such a striated society. To see the world united and not just watching the same event, but also be on the same page with one another is a pipe dream, but an admirable one from a man who still believes in the sanctity of institutions as seen in some of these later works such as Lincoln (2012) and The Post (2017), but nuggets of his altruism can be found across his entire body of work.

That farfetched nature of the story, though, is the point. Disclosure Day is the Lisa Frank sibling to Yorgos Lanthimos’ emo sibling, Bugonia (2025), which also chronicled an alien’s fraught time here on Earth. Spielberg’s film is a desperate wakeup call to the audience not to be complacent and allow for the annihilation shown in Lanthimos’ work, and this rallying cry works well as a feather in the director’s cap. So many of Spielberg’s films center around the notion of cohabitation; seeking understanding and finding ways that we can all share in our Earth and our resources together, and where the antagonists are those who reject their own nature. Through history, spectacle, wild fantasy, and science fiction, Spielberg, in one word sums up the through line of his entire filmography – listen. Listen to each other. Listen to nature. Listen to what goes unsaid. It is only by taking that moment to step back and listen to our neighbors and our surroundings that we can continue to move forward as a terrestrial species. In this way, his trademarked saccharinity is a relief compared to Lanthimos’ pessimism because we leave the auditorium with a tangible sense that we are all connected to each other, not just because we shared in the experience of witnessing along with these characters the truth of our universe, but because we all truly are stewards of this one great, green planet which we call our home among the stars.