Peter Viney's Blog

2026

Directed by Stephen Spielberg
Story by Stephen Spielberg
Screenplay by David Koepp

Music by John Williams

CAST
Emily Blunt – Margaret Fairchild, Kansas City weather reporter
Josh O’Connor- Daniel Kellner, cybersecurity specialist and whistleblower
Colin Firth – Noah Scanlon, head of WARDEX
Eve Hewson – Jane Blankenship, Daniel’s girlfriend
Colman Domingo- Hugo Wakefield, defector from WARDEX
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Wyatt Russell – Jackson, Margaret’s boyfriend
Elizabeth Marvel- Sister Maura, a nun
Henry Lloyd-Hughes- Caspar Boyd, Head of Wardex Security

145 minutes

How to do this without, well, disclosure? We made sure we read nothing about it except that it was Stephen Spielberg direction and story, with Music by John Williams.

Disclosure Day on the posters is 10.6.26. That’s when we saw it. We had been waiting. There are posters with dates for different cities and countries.

So the cast. A tribute to the British Isles. The four major parts are three British (Colin Firth, Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor) and one Irish (Eva Hewson, daughter of Bono.) Colin Firth retains an English RP accent, which is what people want to hear from him. Then he’s Noah Scanlon, the baddie, and as we know baddies have English accents. Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor and Eva Hewson do American. Then Henry Lloyd-Hughes is Boyd, Noah Scanlon’s vicious head of security and he’s English too. I’ve always hugely admired Emily Blunt. In this one, she is at her best.

There is a theory that Spielberg aims to get the world ready for meeting extra-terrestrials, so that we are safe in the knowledge that they are friendly. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET the Extra-Terrestrial were the starters, and now they’re bedded into our consciousness, we get Disclosure Day. The end result. Reviews compare it to Close Encounters. That was FORTY NINE years ago. Let that sink in.

OK, with as little disclosure as possible. It starts at a wrestling match, probably a metaphor for fakery. Daniel is handcuffed, and his girlfriend Jane has been captured.

Noah Scanlon is the Head of Wardex, which is some kind of powerful quasi-government organisation, charged with keeping 79 years of extra-terrestrial contact with the USA secret. Yes, it does date back to the Roswell incident. There is film from various points in the 79 years too.

Daniel has defected from WARDEX with a ‘device’ an extra-terrestrial instrument. Under the tutelage of Hugo, they plan to release the information about aliens (and what the US did to some it found) to the world. Only three devices exist, and Noah has access to another.

Daniel escapes from the WARDEX crew, who are never seen with less than half a dozen black vehicles. The film is a feast of complex car chases, usually six or eight to one.

We cut to a weather report in Kansas City. As soon as we see that Margaret Fairchild, the weather reporter is Emily Blunt, we realize that this is not going to be a walk-on role. We then see her with her boyfriend, Jackson.

A cardinal (a bird, not a cleric) flies in through the window and Margaret discovers psychic abilities which have lain dormant since something happened when she was ten.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian says it better than I can:

Emily Blunt gives a really funny and hyperactive star performance as Margaret Fairchild, employed in Kansas City, Missouri, as a local TV weather presenter, that time-honoured movie symbol of pure celeb flightiness and ambition. On a tense news day, with nuclear powers facing off in North Korea, Margaret gets light-headed at the sight of a little red bird fluttering into her apartment, a mysterious apparition which appears to trigger weird Jedi-style mental powers. She can speak Russian and Korean without knowing she’s doing it; she reads the mind of the traffic cop pulling her over on the way to work; and when she’s on camera, her mouth opens and what comes out is a clicking noise, like Flipper the dolphin sending worrying news from Mars.

The Daniel / Jane plot is a classic chase movie, however by using his copy of the device Noah Scanlon can control and manipulate Jane from hundreds of miles away. I can’t find a still of Eve Hewson as Jane, which is a pity, because she manages to be REALLY scary too. Noah Scanlon is a far scarier Colin Firth role than Mr Darcy or King George VI, that’s for sure.

Daniel reveals to Jane the footage he has of 79 years of US government cover up. It looks like Rockwell alleged footage (whisper, say it actually is?) They don’t bring in the point that bugs me. If the USA knew, then surely Russia and China at least would also have found stuff.

Jane is an ex-nun, or rather novice. Sister Maura, who I would rank as Mother Superior, is an excellent device for squaring the concept of extra-terrestrial life with traditional religion. Well thought out.

In the background World War III is looming over the 38th parallel (North-South Korea).

Margaret suddenly breaks into an alien language on TV. WARDEX start to seek her too, but she knows intuitively that she needs to find Daniel and sets off to do so.

There will be much more chase movie, including the very best car / train sequence I have ever seen.

Sentimentality? OK, yes, there is. Having the aliens manifest as animals is part of it, and the aliens manifesting as animals with a walk though the pine woods is extreme ET referencing. Spielberg is allowed to get away with it.

No more disclosure. With an hour to go I was regretting the large black Americano I drank just before going in, but I could not leave the seat for even a second.

It’s Spielberg. He has made some of the greatest films of my life. This is another.

The tag is WE DESERVE TO KNOW. We were hoping we’d have the secret of the universe revealed at the end. Did we?

*****

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

Brian Tallerico, Roger Ebert.com *****
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. He ends his film with a single word that will be seen as a playful sort of cliffhanger, but I heard it as a plea, a hope for a future in which “I want to believe.”

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian ****
Disclosure Day is never anything other than entertaining and grade-A fun; rare enough in the movies or anywhere else, rocketing along with barnstorming set-pieces, exhilarating chases, funny lines and a career-topper of a performance from Blunt who may yet be morphing into a female version of Tom Hanks. 

Dan Jolin, Empire ****
Spielberg’s heart is so resoundingly in the right place that you’d have to be a truly committed grump to let any of this obstruct your enjoyment. Amid all the thrills and sci-fi spills, and with the help of a uniformly strong cast (though Blunt is the standout here), he presents what is essentially a timely plea for compassion and communication. Humanity can do better, he believes — even if it needs a little childhood-fantasy help.

Yet there are those who fail to get it. If you don’t get it at all, own up, you don’t like BIG movies.

Robbie Collin, The Telegraph **
Nichoplas Barber, BBC Culture **