The following article contains major spoilers for Disclosure Day, including its ending.
Watching a lot of Steven Spielberg’s movies is like bathing in a gigantic bucket of sentimental, dewey-eyed optimism, and Disclosure Day is no different. And I actually mean that as a compliment. As you might’ve read, we live in increasingly depressing times, and it is entirely welcome to leave a cinema feeling less despondent about the state of the world—and, well, humankind—than when you walked in.
Which is kind of an odd way to feel about a story in which the American government is colluding with a shady corporation to hide the existence of aliens from the public. Oh, and all the while, the planet is on the brink of World War III and nuclear destruction—thanks to renewed conflict between North Korea and the United States—and people are either frozen in terror or flocking to supermarkets to stock up on toilet paper in droves. And yet, somehow, Disclosure Day manages to be one of the most hopeful films in years; an anathema to the prevailing notion that everything is going to shit, and all we can do is strap in for the ride. Not least when the film’s ending hits.
First, a brief recap. Josh O’Connor plays mousy-haired whistleblower Daniel Kellner, who has stolen classified evidence of alien visitations to earth—going all the way back to the infamous Roswell incident in the late ’40s—from his employer, the Wardex Corporation, who have long conducted secret research on crashed UFOs on behalf of the White House. In the meantime, what can only be described as “weird shit” starts happening to Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a weather presenter in Kansas City: one morning, she suddenly finds herself fluent in every language known to man, and that she suddenly knows everything about anyone just by looking at them, much to the bafflement of her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell). They are both hunted down by Wardex, led by company chief Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth).
The prospect of Spielberg returning to the home territory subject matter of his early career might’ve had everyone thinking Disclosure Day would be a Close Encounters redux, but the bulk of the movie plays out more like one of his fingertip-chewing thrillers, a la Munich or Bridge of Spies. There are killer action scenes and car chases; woven into it all by screenwriter David Koepp are lofty thematic questions about whether humankind is ready to know about the existence of aliens, and the existential implications that might pose for, say, world religions. (If God made us in his image, why do the aliens have big grey heads and massive ovular eyes?) Turns out that the aliens abducted Kellner and Fairchild when they were young, giving them both nigh-on magical powers.
This all leads to a climax in which, with the globe on the brink of destruction, Kellner and Fairchild—aided by Wardex defector Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) and his fringe group of disclosure advocates—take over the latter’s news station. They broadcast the archived alien footage, revealing the existence of extraterrestrials to the world. This proves enough to take everyone’s eyes off impending geopolitical Armageddon. Only minutes earlier being a red button away from blowing each other to smithereens, the world is reunited in recognizing a status-quo-shattering truth: We are not alone. With that, humanity seems so small—and so do our petty, nukemaxxing disputes. Oh, and then Wakefield wheels an actual alien into the news room, who weakly whispers something in his click-clack space language to Fairchild. She returns to the camera to relay his message: “Listen,” she begins. And then the screen cuts to black.