1 of 5 | From left, Colman Domingo, Tommy Martinez, Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor star in “Disclosure Day,” in theaters Friday. Photo courtesy of Universal Studios
Boy, it’s nice to see a new Steven Spielberg summer blockbuster in 2026. Disclosure Day, in theaters Friday, is every bit the event Jaws, E.T. and Jurassic Park were, and a reminder that skillful storytelling makes for the most exciting movies.
The film begins with Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) caught by Wardex agents. He rescues Jane (Eve Hewson) from Wardex and escapes by threatening to use the alien device Wardex aimed to recover.
Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is a weatherwoman at a Kansas City, Mo., news station. On her way into work one day, she begins speaking foreign languages and psychically knows the personal troubles of strangers, leading her to speak an alien language on air.
Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp give enough information to interest the viewer, then earn our trust to find out more throughout the story. Daniel and Jane even discover new things about each other while on the run together.
Daniel shows her some of the footage he’s planning to leak, thus also confirming to the audience he has the goods. The initial footage includes several dramatic reveals as Spielberg expertly builds drama and engenders sympathy for visitors mistreated by Wardex.
Margaret reaches Daniel and uses terminology that even Margaret doesn’t understand, but it’s enough to warn him. Her introduction sequence escalates to the screwball pace of Hollywood classics like His Girl Friday, with Margaret oblivious to the languages she’s speaking and personal information she ascertains.
Her newfound powers essentially amplify human connection, not special effects. That is ultimately what made E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind timeless, because they touched people.
There is a chase because the film still needs an engine, otherwise Daniel could upload the files to Reddit and be done with it. Hugo (Colman Domingo) is orchestrating the disclosure, and Wardex agent Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) is trying to catch them before they reach Hugo.
Through this, Spielberg delivers his genre-defining staging of suspense and excitement. Agents and vehicles descend upon Daniel and Jane with dramatic escalation and payoff.
Margaret’s reflection is superimposed with a Wardex agent’s face in a window creating an ominous image that launches her fleeing. Any windows in the background are blown out with white light in the Spielbergian tradition.
It helps that so much of Disclosure Day occurs in real locations. Most of the film takes place in the Midwest, though New York and New Jersey were the only U.S. states that hosted filming.
Still, Quebec and New Zealand provided good farmlands and small-town cities.
Sure, there are some visual effects incorporated with stunts, but those blend in because the buildup inches towards a crisis. A Wardex agent rams Margaret’s car further and further into danger, and the sequence continues further than even the largest crash.
Even when visual effects fold wheat fields into crop circle patterns in front of Daniel, that’s more suggestive of a larger discovery than just animating big vehicles or creatures. There is also humor derived from everyday clumsiness in epic situations.
Another world crisis is occurring in the background of the movie. Glimpses of tensions with Korea leading to DEFCON-2 aren’t quite dire enough for Disclosure Day to focus on because the disclosure is an even greater bombshell.
Disclosure Day is an original take on aliens. It contains familiar elements like religion and psychic phenomena, but they are not the aliens of E.T. or Close Encounters either.
Jane argues that revealing the existence of extraterrestrial beings could destabilize world religions by threatening belief in a supreme being. Causing a panic is an objectively valid concern, but the question of faith plays out differently than a science vs. religion debate.
Disclosure Day is pro disclosure. Koepp and Spielberg, who originated the story, ultimately have a belief in people to handle such news.
The final disclosure has faith in a level of cooperation that seems wildly idealistic in 2026, but Spielberg has always been the dreamer.
The film delivers the disclosure it promises, but still leaves a little mystery. Even those disclosures follow the Spielberg pattern of escalation so he’s gently leading the viewer to satisfying conclusions.
Spielberg invented the summer blockbuster with Jaws. 41 years later, with an original story, he’s still got it.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
