Yazar 
A young whistleblower who steals the most important documents humanity has ever had on extraterrestrial contact finds his path crossing that of a television weather anchor while fleeing a covert tech company on his tail. Because the footage in his possession is of a nature that would change everything humanity knows, both the government and shadowy forces are after him to prevent this disclosure.
As the two characters’ flight progresses, the truth that emerges turns out to be far more personal than either expected. Because both of them were specifically chosen for this great disclosure to take place. Disclosure Day, premiering at precisely the moment when real-world UAP debates are reaching their peak, generates enormous curiosity — yet the result it delivers falls far short of meeting that excitement.
Disclosure Day arrives as a 2026 science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg, one of the most important names in cinema history. The screenplay is penned by David Koepp — the writer behind Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, and Mission: Impossible — working from a story by Spielberg himself. The film stars Emily Blunt as the weather anchor, Josh O’Connor as the whistleblower, Colin Firth as the villain, and in supporting roles Colman Domingo, Eve Hewson, and Wyatt Russell.
Cinematography is handled by Spielberg‘s indispensable collaborator Janusz Kamiński, while the score is signed by legendary composer John Williams. This film marks the thirtieth time Williams and Spielberg have worked together. An Amblin Entertainment production distributed by Universal Pictures, the film carries a budget of 115 million dollars and runs 145 minutes — just under two and a half hours. Disclosure Day opens in Turkey on June 10 and in the United States on June 12, 2026.
A striking piece of production trivia: David Koepp rewrote the screenplay a full forty-two times, working from a forty-page story outline Spielberg sent him by email. The reason Spielberg was unusually meticulous on this front is attributed to his prior work in this area and his desire to make this his definitive treatment of the subject.
As his inspirations for the project, Spielberg cites the famous Glowing Auras and Black Money article published in The New York Times in 2017 — which exposed the Pentagon’s secret UFO program — and the Fravor footage leaked to the public during the same period. Yet despite all this talk of meticulousness and forty-two drafts, the result is unfortunately a colossal disappointment.
This article contains spoilers for Disclosure Day.
What Is Disclosure Day Actually About?
To evaluate the film meaningfully, one must first understand the real ground from which it feeds. “Disclosure” has in recent years become the name of a growing movement in the United States. The UFO question — long shunted aside and branded a conspiracy theory — has transformed into a serious arena of debate that now involves official government institutions. First, the terminology changed. The word “UFO” has been officially replaced by “UAP,” meaning “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.” This shift is intended to help the subject shed its stigmatized past and come to be taken more seriously.
In recent years, UAP hearings of a kind unseen in the US Congress for half a century have taken place. Former Pentagon officials, military pilots, and intelligence experts testified under oath. The claim that garnered the most attention was former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch‘s allegation that the US government had retrieved craft and even bodies of extraterrestrial origin and concealed this from the public. Former Pentagon AATIP program director Luis Elizondo and pilot David Fravor — a witness to the USS Nimitz incident — are among the other prominent figures in this process.
In short, just weeks before Spielberg’s film was released, a real-world historic disclosure process was unfolding that directly mirrored the film’s subject matter. On May 8, 2026, the Pentagon shared the first package — 162 files covering more than 400 incidents — through a dedicated website. Documentaries like The Age of Disclosure, directed by Dan Farah, also landed squarely in this moment. The film has in its hands an incredibly rich, current pool of stories. Yet it entirely fails to capitalize on this immense potential.
A Story That Gives Away Its Surprise From the First Scene
The film opens with a rapid prologue that from the very outset shows a whistleblower fleeing with footage that will expose extraterrestrial life. Once this contains no surprise whatsoever, the question of what will happen over two and a half hours never leaves your mind. The organization invented for the film remains far too groundless and artificial. The film’s reduction of such complex and rich reality to a single generic company undermines its credibility from the start.
Moreover, the upfront display of alien bodies at the film’s opening telegraphs immediately that the story will offer a thoroughly clichéd use of aliens. The aliens we encounter are the familiar “Grays” the popular imagination has consumed countless times — big-headed, large dark-eyed, clichéd alien typology. At such a moment in time, Spielberg’s imagination relying on this exhausted depiction is frankly startling. Beyond this, the idea that the world’s most important files are in the hands of this one man, and that he runs from place to place rather than simply leaking them online, makes no logical sense. A character who possesses information that would change the fate of humanity failing to do the first obvious thing and instead being chased for two hours constitutes one of the screenplay’s most fundamental logic problems.
Nearly two hours of a two-and-a-half-hour film pass in an empty chase and pursuit action. Disclosure Day ends with the footage being disclosed via a local television channel that suddenly spreads to the entire world — with no force able to intervene, and all of humanity standing in the street watching. This naive finale entirely severs the already tenuous connection the film had with reality.
Chosen People and a Contact That Turns Into a Zoo
We learn as the film progresses that both main characters are in fact chosen individuals. The aliens communicate with these two people to help the disclosure take place. No explanation is ever given for why, in an entire world, these two specific individuals were selected. This chosen-ones concept, rather than adding depth to the story, strips it further of credibility.
The film’s handling of the aliens appearing in different forms turns the contact subject into an outright zoo. Real contact cases in ufology literature describe common motifs: “missing time,” regression hypnosis, and “screen memory” — where witnesses remember owls or familiar human faces placed over their real experiences by the subconscious. But there is no serious data whatsoever about appearing in the forms of foxes, birds, deer, and a whole menagerie of other animals. The film’s spreading of this motif across a forest-full of animals turns the eeriness of real accounts into a cheap fantasy show.
The sheer absurdity of the scene in which Margaret Fairchild as a child walks through what looks like a Narnia world surrounded by animals further torpedoes the film. And when it is revealed that the house painstakingly constructed throughout the film is a replica of the character’s childhood home just so she can remember the truth, even Spielberg seems not to have noticed how unnecessary this was. The eye-scarring animal CGI puts the finishing touch on all of this.
How Does a Legend Make a Film Like This?
This is where an inevitable question arises: how does Steven Spielberg manage to make such a weak film? Spielberg stands among the directors who have handled the extraterrestrial theme most effectively in cinema. He laid the very milestones of the genre with 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1982’s E.T. Close Encounters of the Third Kind stands out as the most concrete proof of his meticulousness on this subject. Even the film’s title comes directly from the contact classification developed by astronomer and ufologist J. Allen Hynek. Spielberg hired Hynek as a technical consultant to keep the film as faithful as possible to actual eyewitness accounts. It was precisely this meticulousness that formed the foundation of the sense of reality in his films.
This is why Disclosure Day being this groundless, clichéd, and riddled with logic problems creates an even greater disappointment. Timing it to coincide with the real recent developments and his previous successes had everyone excited. But what has been produced is a film parody in nature. The disclosure footage also looks bargain-basement through its poor CGI. None of this is remotely fitting for the director who signed a masterwork like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Disclosure Day touches on virtually all of the topic’s iconic elements — from Roswell to crop circles, from suppressed contacts to Pentagon footage — yet all of these remain unable to rise above cheap absurdity.
John Williams’s Signature That Doesn’t Fit the Film
Spielberg once again works with legendary composer John Williams. From the film’s very first minutes it is easy to tell these pieces belong to John Williams. The compositions are remarkable in their own right. But Williams‘s grandiose, epic style does not fit the film’s atmosphere or subject matter at all. The viewer feels throughout as if watching an Indiana Jones adventure on a loop. The problem is not the quality of the music — it is that this music does not belong to this film or its subject. Add to this Spielberg’s constant use of music for nearly the entire two and a half hours, which imposes an additional layer of fatigue on a film that already has tempo problems.
The Cast and Cinematography
Disclosure Day features star names like Colin Firth and Emily Blunt and rising stars like Colman Domingo and Josh O’Connor. Performances are generally above average. However, since character depth and motivations remain thin and the dialogue is weak, the actors cannot reach the level they should. Colin Firth‘s portrayal of Noah Scanlon in particular draws a comical, clichéd profile that unintentionally provokes laughter. Setting aside the poor CGI, there are several striking frames bearing Janusz Kamiński‘s signature. But the film does not offer a visual experience extraordinary enough to be etched in memory. The poor CGI — covering animals, UFOs and alien archival footage alike — makes itself felt in nearly every scene and inadvertently turns the striking realities the film is trying to convey into a comedy.
Flow and Genre Confusion
Disclosure Day is also highly problematic in terms of flow. The two-and-a-half-hour runtime absolutely does not flow and feels as if it will never end. The film’s genre identity is also confused. Its premise and story indicate a science fiction–mystery film. But what we predominantly see is unnecessary action sequences, car chases, and pursuits of the kind found in Minority Report or the Mission: Impossible franchise. A film that should be mysterious and thought-provoking constantly leans on empty action formulas and undermines its own genre identity.
Disclosure Day is a great disappointment that squanders its immense potential, topicality, and rich pool of reality. That Steven Spielberg himself — with a screenplay that went through forty-two drafts — has produced a film this groundless and parody-like is frankly astonishing. The strong cast led by Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor, along with a few striking frames by Janusz Kamiński, are not enough to rescue the situation. At precisely the moment when a historic disclosure process is unfolding in the real world, Spielberg’s treatment of this matter in such a superficial and naive manner is the film’s true tragedy. The curious and meticulous director who made Close Encounters of the Third Kind is, unfortunately, nowhere to be found in this film. Disclosure Day will be remembered as the film that claimed to tell the story of the truth’s disclosure while being the one that missed that disclosure most completely.
To read more articles by Buğra Mert Alkayalar, click here.
Follow us on Youtube, X and Instagram for more.
I Am Frankelda: A Fantastical Reflection of Grotesque Reality
Yorumlar