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Review: Spielberg’s Disclosure Day Unites Profound Questions with Top-Tier Action

Steven Spielberg’s latest sci-fi thriller, "Disclosure Day," starring Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor, explores the truths of alien life on Earth, blending deep inquiry with some of the director's most impressive action sequences to date.

Consequence·Jun 9, 2026·via Consequence

Review: Spielberg’s Disclosure Day Unites Profound Questions with Top-Tier Action

Liz Shannon Miller Jun 9, 2026 | 12:00 PM

Even if you’re not aware of the concept of the “Spielberg face,” that combination of words probably evokes their meaning: The wide-eyed stare of a character experiencing pure awe at what they’re seeing, whether it be a dinosaur or a loved one or a spaceship. In Disclosure Day , director Steven Spielberg isn’t just wielding one of his most famous tropes — he’s weaponizing it, using it as a major plot device in a fast-paced story rich with both adult sophistication and childlike wonder.

Disclosure Day is both small and massive in scope — focused on a few specific characters over the course of a few days. That tightness could feel claustrophobic, except it allows the film to explore huge themes about faith and aliens, and how the existence of one might affect the other. In between the car chases, that is.

Spielberg and writer David Koepp’s script drops the viewer right into the story, an in medias res opening that demands careful attention as foreign terms and new characters get tossed into the mix, backstory delivered in fleeting asides. When the film begins, cybersecurity expert Daniel ( Josh O’Connor ) is already on the run from massive corporation Wardex, which is led by the obviously nefarious Noah (Colin Firth) and powered by insanely advanced technology. In his backpack, Daniel has a massive trove of information that Wardex doesn’t want made public. But Daniel believes otherwise, so he and his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) make their first of many daring escapes from Wardex’s men, all in service to Daniel’s ultimate goal: Reveal the truth about aliens to the planet’s eight billion people.

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Those eight billion people are feeling pretty stressed at the moment, as international chaos has ordinary folk rushing the stores for gas and supplies and news anchors talking solemnly about the country’s DEFCON 2 status. (The exact specifics of the ongoing conflict are unclear, beyond it being compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis and involving the U.S., Russia, and North Korea.)

Speaking of the news: When Kansas City weather lady Margaret Fairchild ( Emily Blunt ) shows up to work the morning after Daniel and Jane go on the run, she’s finding that she knows a lot of private information about the people she encounters that day. And when she does go live on the air, instead of delivering the weather report, she starts talking in a language that sounds like beatboxing, but with more tongue-clicking. (Could it be… an alien language?)

When that footage goes viral, Margaret also becomes a target for Wardex, and from there, the pace proves relentless as the good guys flee and/or hide from the bad. The fact that Spielberg, at the age of 79, is still delivering action this fresh and original remains a marvel, especially considering the limits he places on himself here: There’s no fancy future tech involved, just some cars and SUVs and (in perhaps the movie’s most thrilling sequence) a train. He is an artist, and his medium of choice remains the mid-size sedan.

Disclosure Day (Universal)

Not that there’s a lack of future tech, thanks to the alien-device-powered system which allows Noah to “drop” into the consciousnesses of those he’s pursuing, communicating with them from a distance and even managing to seize control over them for periods of time. It’s a device used effectively for moments of suspense as well as exposition, its rules and limitations explained with Spielberg’s usual visual economy. It’s one of the few sci-fi tricks he allows himself, otherwise keeping the approach relatively stripped down.

His ensemble is also relatively tight, considering the scope of the story: This is largely a cast of British actors playing Americans, though the accents all hold up, Emily Blunt’s especially. Overall, she’s the movie’s MVP, navigating the hairpin turns required of her character’s journey with an ease that could be overlooked — except when Margaret starts speaking fluent Korean or Russian. By comparison, Josh O’Connor has the less flashy role, but he’s got proven leading man verve at this point, capable of grounding even the most seemingly outlandish concepts.

Colman Domingo continues his largely winning 2026 streak, after stunning turns in The Four Seasons Season 2 and the Euphoria series finale — he’s not given a lot to play, but he’s the steady sort of presence necessary to balance out the movie’s wilder moments. The weakest link might be Colin Firth , but the issues with his performance feel largely script-based, as his character makes some turns that feel unsupported. Overall, there are elements of the ending that feel underbaked, characters whose fates feel ill-defined. It’s an unfortunate side effect of that aforementioned tight focus; just a touch more detail might help expand things in a more satisfying way.

Still, it all slams together for one epic, emotional conclusion. Perhaps what’s most unexpected about Disclosure Day is how its message of hope is more subtle than you might expect — revealed with the same kind of one-line asides that also explain a character’s entire backstory. It’s mature storytelling in the best way, trusting the audience to understand the story’s meaning without too much handholding…

Well, okay, there’s the deployment of a literal nun (played by Elizabeth Marvel) to help untangle the bigger questions of belief involved. But it’s easy to see why Spielberg might see her presence as necessary: There have been times when he hasn’t been fully successful in communicating his intentions as a storyteller (see, as one example, the number of people who think that those are aliens at the end of A.I. , not robots).

It all speaks to the ways in which Spielberg has matured as a filmmaker over his decades of service. However, one thing hasn’t changed — nearly 50 years since the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind , he still has an open heart when it comes to the possibility of life from other planets, and a lot of faith in humanity’s ability to accept that possibility. The danger of Disclosure Day ‘s optimism being misinterpreted feels minimal. As long as people are willing to listen.

Disclosure Day gets revealed to the world on Friday, June 12th. Check out the latest trailer below.