Review Roundup: Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day
Thanks to classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Steven Spielberg’s name has become synonymous with aliens. And now, 40+ years after making those films, he returns to the big question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe.
This time around, a whistleblower seeks to blow the lid on the biggest conspiracy of all time, even as elaborate forces marshal against him. Meanwhile, mysterious phenomena begin occurring around the world, with a TV meteorologist becoming an unlikely mouthpiece for the biggest revelation in the history of mankind.
Working with long-time screenwriting partner David Koepp, it’s clear that Spielberg is swinging for the fences with Disclosure Day. But does it stack up to his classic films of the past? Or is it just a retread from the blockbuster maestro? Read on for a selection of critics’ reactions to Disclosure Day.
The main themes — whether aliens and a supreme deity can co-exist, and why empathy is important — are conveyed by people making long, polished speeches about them. And its thesis on alien life is so amazingly uninspired that you’d assume that Spielberg had pondered it for several minutes, not several decades.
That sensation of déjà vu with diminishing returns permeates the whole of Disclosure Day, which feels like a tour of tropes that Spielberg has tackled with greater skill and sensitivity earlier in his illustrious career. Over the course of a lumbering 145 minutes, the director revisits authorities-eluding car chases (The Sugarland Express), alien encounters (E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), paranoid thrills (Minority Report), and even earth-shattering exposé journalism (The Post). This time around, however, he’s excavating those ideas in ways that fail to engage emotionally and that misunderstand the culture’s current relationship with the news media.
Spielberg believes in God. He also believes in aliens. How exactly does one reconcile the two? The director answers that in the best way he knows: By delivering an extended, and impeccably put-together final set piece, scored to John Williams’s music, that for all its outward corniness manages to be shockingly moving, often in the simplest of ways.
While Spielberg has never lost his sense of fun, Disclosure Day is uniquely fortified by the sense that he’s still searching for new ways to enrapture a jaded audience with his spectacle, and the movie’s ethos becomes that much harder to deny every time its director manages to suspend our disbelief all over again.
It’s a densely layered narrative filled with intense set pieces, brilliant performances, things you’ve never seen before, things you’ll never see again, and enough heart to tie it all together. There are scenes in it that rival some of Spielberg’s best in terms of wonder and ingenuity, and there are also some issues that hold it back ever so slightly from being a full-blown masterpiece.
Yes, this is exquisitely woven, capital “E” entertainment, that’s funny and unabashedly sentimental in all the ways we expect Spielberg to be, with a particular action sequence primed to steal the breath out of your lungs. But he’s grown older; so has much of his audience. And faith, in its broadest terms – in people, in an existence beyond what we see before us, in the idea we can ameliorate humanity by embracing uncertainty – is harder won now.
Even if you’re not aware of the concept of the “Spielberg face,” that combination of words probably evokes their meaning: The wide-eyed stare of a character experiencing pure awe at what they’re seeing, whether it be a dinosaur or a loved one or a spaceship. In Disclosure Day, director Steven Spielberg isn’t just wielding one of his most famous tropes — he’s weaponizing it, using it as a major plot device in a fast-paced story rich with both adult sophistication and childlike wonder.
In a kind of spiritual dialogue with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Spielberg’s latest low-key masterpiece closes the loop on a conversation he has been ruminating on for much of his career: whether we are alone in the universe, and what that knowledge might do to us.
The final scenes of Disclosure Day are among the most emotionally riveting of Spielberg’s career in ways you won’t predict. They lean into his sentimentality and thank God or whatever Non-Humanoid Supreme Being that they do. In a time dominated by unceasing cynicism, to have a master like this who truly believes in the power of transportive filmmaking is a gift.
Spielberg is no stranger to considering extraterrestrial life, having directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. at the start of his career, followed by War of the Worlds and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in his later years. Disclosure Day is the perfect vehicle to bring back the more classic, 1980s vibe.
Disclosure Day lands in theaters on June 12, 2026. Watch the trailer below.
