June 10, 2026

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Disclosure Day – Close Encounters of the Sappy Kind.

Steven Spielberg. Aliens. Summertime.

’nuff said, right? Wrong. Oh, so wrong.

“Disclosure Day” boasts a trippy cast, a timely premise and the potential for endless thrills. The result is a mess, suggesting that the iconic storyteller’s best days are behind him.

Boy, were those days movie magic. Now? The only illusion here is thinking this saga is worth its bloated running time.

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“Disclosure Day” sounds so intriguing on paper, but nearly every element offers surface-level thinking. Even worse?

The dramatic stakes are all over the map, arguably the film’s biggest lapse. And then there’s Hugo (the great Colman Domingo), trying to thwart Noah’s plans. Hugo is part of an effort to tell the world all about the aliens hidden by dark, nebulous forces.

Who are these forces? Why are so many aliens visiting Earth? What is their purpose? Is there a reason for their repeated visits? If they’re so sophisticated, why are they constantly in peril once they reach our planet?

Make some of this make sense.

“Disclosure Day” asks endless questions while offering few answers. The story quickly falls into a stale pattern of chase, escape and chase anew.

Sonny Bunch concurs, declaring Disclosure Day “Close encounters of the trite kind:”

It’s not fair to Disclosure Day or screenwriter David Koepp—who apparently wrote this in conjunction with Spielberg, who has described it as the culmination of his interest in the subject of alien life—to compare this film to something like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a genuine masterpiece of sci-fantasy wonder. But there’s something to be said for the earlier movie’s sense of detached awe, the innate curiosity at the heart of its desperate hunger for the truth and the uncertainty that comes with unknowing. That’s a movie that was written and directed by a young man who felt he still had so much to learn, so much to see, so much to do. It’s a movie made by a man who can understand abandoning his family and getting on that ship and taking it to wherever the little gray men want to take him. In many ways it’s a movie about that man, an unconscious synthesis of his artistically minded mother and scientifically minded father.

Disclosure Day, on the other hand, is a film made by a man who has seen it all—or at least enough to think that he has unlocked the key to it all. It’s a movie that has its feet firmly on the ground, more concerned with the mundanity of man’s petty squabbles, and the potential ugliness and destruction always lurking nearby, than any exploration of the cosmos. It’s a film that blithely dismisses the upheaval that revelations about extraterrestrial life would unleash, choosing instead to argue that a worldwide information dump about the existence of little grey men would be such a unifying moment that we’d all simply stare at our phones in wonder and forget about little things like “wars” or “North Korean ballistic missiles.” (Okay, fair enough: This is probably the smartest point the film makes.)

But perhaps not to the level that Spielberg thinks, in order to hype his film:

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll