Spielberg's 'Disclosure Day' Explores Alien Contact and Whistleblower Themes

Six months after a cryptic billboard reading “All Will Be Disclosed” popped up unannounced in Times Square, Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day was finally released at global cinemas last week. The film sees the director returning to the sci-fi themes that have fascinated him throughout his career, braiding together multiple character storylines in an adrenaline-fueled – and occasionally dizzying – adventure. Read on for a spoiler-packed breakdown of the film’s themes, layers and Easter eggs, and let us know what you think in the comments.

We are not alone

Spielberg’s fascination with outer space dates back all the way to when he was a young boy. At the age of around five or six, his dad woke him up in the middle of the night to drive out to a quiet field near their New Jersey home, where father and son watched a majestic meteor shower light up the sky. The experience inspired to tell stories “not of this world”, sowing the seeds for his very first film, 1964’s alien invasion sci-fi Firelight, which Spielberg made for $500 when he was just 17 years old. He would later revisit the themes on a blockbuster scale with 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1982’s ET the Extra-Terrestrial, which broke away from depictions of aliens as little green boogeymen and – like Disclosure Day – shows them as complex and emotional creatures that long for connection and to be understood.

Props to whistleblowers

Disclosure Day has clear-cut heroes and villains from the jump. Among the good guys are Margret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), an ambitious and slightly ditzy weather girl who is given the ability to speak an alien language and see into people’s minds after she is visited by a red cardinal one morning (the bird turns out to be an alien in disguise.) Meanwhile, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is a rebel who has defected from shadowy agency Wardex with decades’ worth of suppressed data about aliens. After serving jail time for cybercrimes, he’s set on sharing it with the public. “What I stole, it belongs to 8 billion people – the whole world,” he tells his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson).

But not if Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the Wardex top brass, has anything to say about it: he’s set on suppressing information about alien life in a bid to keep their technology for himself. (It’s best not to think too hard about how some of their gadgets and gizmos work.) Firth is silkily villainous here, and charming enough to get away with ominous announcements like “History doesn’t have a reset key” that could invite eye-rolls in actors with less gravitas. There’s no doubt as to his cruelty: the first time we see aliens in the film is when Kellner pulls up laptop footage of one poor creature on an operating table as Scanlon orders a vivisection without anaesthetic.

As the film zig-zags between characters, there’s an unambiguous sense that Spielberg is on the side of Fairchild and Kellner: I found myself wondering if the director was tipping his hat to real-world whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who faced harsh consequences for leaking government secrets.

High-octane thrills

Disclosure Day opens at a violent wrestling match and rarely lets up its whiplash pace, and it’s so artfully shot and framed that you rarely want it to. It’s heaps of fun to see O’Connor as a speed demon in an SUV – in a break from his subtler arthouse roles – and outwit an army of sinister goons in a jaw-dropping car chase sequence. Spielberg hasn’t delivered edge-of-your seat thrills like this since Minority Report. The actor is also at the center of the film’s most dazzling sequence, where a camera whips around him as winds rise to cover a cornfield with intricate crop circles. It may be a little too sentimental for everyone’s tastes, but I was also charmed by a flashback scene to Fairchild and Kellner’s alien abductions as children, as they are led to a Hansel and Gretel style house by extra terrestrials disguised as woodland creatures.

Brava, Emily Blunt!

The cast is jam-packed with stars – Blunt, O’Connor, Firth, Hewson, and Colman Domingo as a zen mentor figure to the whistleblowers – and there isn’t a weak link between them. But the movie gets its biggest laughs and much of its emotional heft from Blunt’s attuned performance. After an encounter with villainous Noah Scanlon (Firth), he marvels at her super-human powers. “What is she?” he murmurs, as an associate answers him: “Unstoppable.”

After a few slightly thankless projects in recent years (The Smashing Machine, The Fall Guy), Disclosure Day joins the recent The Devil Wears Prada 2 as a reminder of how Blunt can dazzle – as well as make the film’s increasingly outlandish plot feel grounded and sincere. I’d be very happy to see her get a best actress nomination at next year’s Oscars.

Aliens exist

“I think people’s questions about what’s going on – in our skies; in our world; with reality itself – has reached a critical mass of complete fascination,” Spielberg says in the film’s production notes. The seed for Disclosure Day was planted in 2017, after the director read a New York Times report outlining new details about a top-secret Pentagon UFO program, and earlier this year interest in extra terrestrials reached a new fever pitch after Barack Obama said: “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them” on a podcast. Not to be outdone, Trump swiftly promised to release the files they have on alien life.

Just this month, the chair of the International Academy of Astronautics committee for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence said that discovery of alien life was not a case of “if” but “when”. “I don’t know if it’s this year, next year, or the next decade, or the next century, or whatever,” he said. “But eventually, someone’s going to find something.” It all gives an eerily prescient sense to Disclosure Day, that cannily taps into how news of alien life would spread globally (Spoiler: it would mainly involve people staring in silence at their phones).

Leaning into conspiracy theories

Spielberg has to be one of the only directors who can make debunked alien conspiracy theories feel not only believable, but emotionally sincere. The film’s audacious climax sees Fairchild, Kellner and Wakefield hijack a Kansas City news station, interrupting coverage of war in North Korea for a monumental announcement: This is Disclosure Day. They then show classified footage of aliens visiting earth that dates all the way back to 1947’s Roswell incident, with beautifully created “archive footage” that looks uncannily realistic. It’s particularly tough to watch moments of images of aliens injured, or suffering at the hands of human cruelty, perhaps because you suspect that we would greet extraterrestrials with violence whether or not they were to come in peace.

In the film’s final moments a lithe, silvery alien emissary is wheeled into the TV studio, emerges from a kind of hyperbaric chamber and delivers a message for Fairchild to pass on to the citizens of earth. Is it a plea for empathy? A promise that humanity will pay for its crimes? Just as she opens her mouth to deliver it, the credits roll.