Disclosure Day
2026
🎯 Verdict
✍️ Full Review
The Second Coming of Virtually Nothing or maybe just multiple Pauls. You’ve gotta be kidding me. That’s it? What’s with all the hype about how the OG Spielberg is finally back!! Vince Gilligan has already done a phenomenal job with Pluribus. Spielberg is just catching dirt following Gilligan while not being able to get his Ready Player One monkey off of him. He mixes it all up with a little bit of The X-Files and Fringe and viola, we have ourselves a bit of everything from Close Encounters and E.T. to Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report nostalgia going on with hints of Shyamalan. It’s all jumbled in the end. Steven goes full on David Wilcock mode and the conspiracist MJ-12, Ufologist route along with Reddit subculture. Advocate of what is known as the Disclosure Movement Stephen Greer once claimed, “aliens are here to help us and the military-industrial complex is hyping their danger and creating the U.S. Space Force to prepare for interplanetary war”, and films such as Independence Day are indicative of “a false narrative created by covert groups striving to generate fear of ETs”. It looks like Spielberg took heavy inspiration from that. The conspiracy angle doesn’t hold up because the concept itself has been out there for quite some time and therefore, looking pretty worn-out by now. So many fascinating and exhilarating things beyond comprehension were happening along with surprising addition of some of the devil-may-care stunt works yet the main plot itself was very flat riddled with contrived magic from the philosophy of one of those mediocre 2000s science fiction tv shows or those ludicrous documentaries about first contact.Apart from the empathy booster shots Spielberg wants to inject into us which if I may say so is very timely and topical along with the patently varying views different people hold about how to operate under a specific conundrum, the skeletal framework of a science fiction which is to fundamentally challenge us by knocking the socks off of us while relish in the awe and wonder of a fresh idea never been experienced before. That whole element was missing. Highly disappointed with this one even though the direction, performances and all the technical details meet the right marks as per the required Spielberg standards. I get it with the Congressional hearings on the UAPs and the supposed evidence for the retrieved extraterrestrial biologics, excitements have been ripe and are hardly containable but this isn’t the way. I expected something akin to Arrival given all the hullabaloo but this definitely ain’t it. I thought I would never say this and hoped this day would never come. But, here we are. It physically pains me to admit that Disclosure Day is not just one of my worst experiences while watching a Spielberg movie but also it’s one of the most mediocre sci-fi movies of all time filled with outdated story devices and trite unoriginal foundational quotients. Even if it all follows this particular fate, it’s cute that one of the most proficient, accomplished and venerated directors of modern cinema thinks it’s gonna be that easy and smooth. This new first contact film is a wet dream for the conspiracy theorists and it’s majorly mundane and uneventful. It’s definitely not the return of the OG Spielberg, not even remotely close, rather it’s a downgrade.