Lights in the Sky

Considering Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’ and his magic-of-movies persona.

By Brendan HodgesJuly 23, 2026

• Film

• SF

FACES ARE MADE BRIGHT by the shimmer of screens, stunned as they watch the world change forever. Broadcast around the globe is the first glimpse of extraterrestrial life, a nearly divine revelation that unites a fragmented world in a time of division and doubt. It is a moment of globalized holy communion, a prayer for a newly resurrected monoculture, and as many have suggested, a plea for empathy. The world is saved.

For audiences in 2026, the scene above—which concludes Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day— might feel like a leap of faith. For one, it’s never been harder to trust the media. Exploitative algorithms, generative AI, and corrupt news networks have destroyed confidence in images and sounds to the point that seeing is no longer believing—a video of rabbits bouncing on a trampoline must be greeted with the same questioning eye as footage out of a war zone. Taken at face value, the notion that aliens could unite us, especially at a time when fake information has never been more convincing, can seem offensively, boomerishly naive, an out-of-touch Hollywood fantasy in exactly the wrong film at exactly the wrong time.

But look again—the crowds of Spielberg’s absurd, hokey, and brilliant film don’t have the face. You know the one. The dilated eyes and mouths agape in stupefied wonder, like those amazed by the dance of flying saucers in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) or the lumbering Brachiosaurus in Jurassic Park (1993). Instead, these faces are comparatively vague, fixed with a neutral befuddlement of high but uncertain emotion. For all the criticism that Disclosure Day has a delusionally happy ending, it’s not at all clear that the onlookers have embraced empathy as the new global order. They still don’t quite know what to feel—and judging by the massively varied reactions to what may be the most divisive film of Spielberg’s career, neither do we.

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Despite the popular perception that Spielberg is a maudlin entertainer with endings of pure schmaltz, he’s always been an artist of searching, irreconcilable differences. In a single camera move, a Spielberg film can be singing and sentimental, bitter and angry, overpoweringly direct and sneakily sophisticated. Tony Kushner regards Spielberg as the modern Charles Dickens, another master of popular storytelling cursed with being underestimated:

Wilde says awful things about Dickens’ sentimentality, but then you actually read Dickens. And there’s searing pathos. Outrage. Hallucinatory images. It redefines language. And it’s the same with Steven. People condescend to him with this idea he makes reassuring pabulum. It’s a great mistake.

Spielberg’s third eye is most palpable in his beginnings, cold opens with swooshing displays of craft and ingenuity; it’s his endings that give him away. On the surface, they are smiling and reconciliatory, full of bear hugs and easy promises of safety, exactly what’s meant by a “Hollywood” ending. But below, they are complicated and uncertain. Often, their ambiguity is obscured by the sheer force of image and sound. Consider how often Spielberg’s protagonists— Elliott in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Roy in Close Encounters (1977), Oskar in Schindler’s List (1993)—are left in states of anticipatory flux, even if John Williams’s emotionally overwhelming scores suggest otherwise.

Like the soaring finale in E.T., Spielberg movies find a way to make things feel okay even when they aren’t. The ending to Jaws (1975) may still do it best: what begins as a joyous reprieve, as the victorious heroes swim home, turns melancholic and wistful as the shark’s bloody carcass sinks to the sea floor. In a classic study of 1970s popular culture, philosopher Fredric Jameson characterized Jaws as part of Spielberg’s bifurcated tendency to critique the status quo while seemingly reinforcing it, with the shark exposing socioeconomic tensions that will linger long after the credits roll. To put it another way, his films blend the optimism of Frank Capra with the social edge of John Ford, a hybridity that makes them especially prone to misreading.

Spielberg loves the old joke that an artist doesn’t need therapy because they put it all in the work. It shows—beyond the absent fathers and fears around parenthood, it’s as though his films turn the opposing forces in his mind into cinematic action. It’s easy to surmise while watching Saving Private Ryan (1998) that Spielberg has a deep love of his country, which he then problematizes by questioning the moral high ground of the United States in World War II. It’s a movie about the bureaucracy of broken systems and how easily the value of life can be rationalized behind numbers and math. The video essay series Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg correctly points out that Ryan ends not with a devotional patriotic salute but with the titular hero totally unsure if his life meant anything at all. Jaws, Schindler’s List, Lincoln (2012), Bridge of Spies (2015), The Fabelmans (2022), and now Disclosure Day all pose similarly unanswerable questions.

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This context is crucial for Disclosure Day, a heteroglossial thriller that powerfully reflects the contradictory pull between hope and horror that has been so central to Spielberg’s films. Working from the rare original genre story by Spielberg (his first since 1982’s Poltergeist, directed by Tobe Hooper), screenwriter David Koepp catapults the viewer into daring chases and quick getaways, only to pump the brakes for heady, discursive discussions on religion, ethics, language, and empathy.

That tension is felt in the spectacularly disorienting opening shot, which plunges the viewer from the opening titles into the POV of a handheld digital camera in a roaring wrestling match. A wrestler stomps, grabs, and punches the camera lens—and by extension, the audience—square in the face. It’s a provocative beginning that introduces the film’s Big Ideas: the pain inherent in assuming the point of view of another, the public’s appetite for storytelling and performance, the ways screens intersect with reality, and humanity’s renewed need for community. Spielberg recently joked that he only made Ready Player One (2018) so he could craft an ending that tells people to get outside. In Disclosure Day, they seem to have absorbed this lesson—images of crowds begin and end the film, and though their eyes are still stuck to screens, they (at least) share a unified focus.

Koepp’s screenplay builds that theme of separation and togetherness into the film’s structure, with the heroes on distinct paths that converge around a shared cause infused with quasi-religious significance. The lead character Daniel (Josh O’Connor), a whistleblower and math supergenius who understands alien language, has fled the shady company Wardex with hard drives containing proof that extraterrestrials exist. Seeking him out is Margaret (Emily Blunt), a news anchor given telepathic, empathic abilities that soon have her speaking in tongues. Each is paired with a partner who questions their calling. Daniel’s girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) is an ex-novitiate experiencing a crisis of faith, while Margaret is dating a doubting Thomas named Jackson (Wyatt Russell). Hugo (Coleman Domingo) is the film’s John the Baptist, a prophet for the alien’s secret plans, mysteriously building a replica of Margaret’s childhood home. Completing the biblical metaphor is Wardex head Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), a Pontius Pilate who believes that the public learning about aliens would trigger chaos.

These characters become conduits for the film’s galaxy of ideas, making it of a piece with Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (2023) and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019), equally self-questioning films by aging masters who revisited, and then revised, the genres that helped make them famous. They’re the kinds of films where if the viewer is plugged deeply enough into that filmmaker’s deeply personal vision, strengths and weaknesses can become equally meaningful, tangible expressions of their creative voice and authorship.

Look at the way Disclosure Day rips along like a runaway train, only to have characters pull the emergency brake to discuss religion, complicity, and existentialism. Just as the opening escape hits fever pitch with Daniel and Jane on the run, the pacing halts so each can share their hidden life lore and personal philosophies around truth; it’s an unwieldy balance that can make for awkward, staccato viewing. A similar criticism was also made of Munich (2005), which pivoted between gritty spy action and political rhetoric; the most powerful sequence involved neither guns nor hidden bombs, but an Israeli and a Palestinian in a quiet stairwell, arguing how far they would go for their ideas of home. Disclosure Day has the equivalent of, like, six stairwell scenes. It’s the talkiest blockbuster Spielberg has ever made, less motivated by elaborate set pieces—indeed, there are only three, and while gripping, they’re oddly spare—than the dialectics between them. Yet as the story develops, those jarring pivots in rhythm and pace begin to work to the film’s advantage, forcing the viewer to lean in and, as in the critical final word spoken before the credits roll, to listen.

Which is to say, Disclosure Day is best enjoyed not as a summer blockbuster but as a morality play—there are arguments for truth versus consequence, aliens versus God, obligation versus safety, and, above all, whether the human race can handle world-changing revelations. It’s as though Koepp was reaching for the dense oratory of Kushner’s work, fitting rich dilemmas into the template of a Hollywood thriller. Koepp doesn’t approach the poetry of Kushner’s language, but when Daniel insists that nobody can own the truth any more than they can own light or air, it resonates. The phrasing recalls Kushner citing Euclid in Lincoln: “Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.”

To Daniel, the truth is a Kantian absolute. However humanity responds to aliens existing among us—violently or peacefully—it doesn’t matter; the importance of truth supersedes it. It’s a question of complicity, a core aspect of Spielberg’s filmography, from Jaws to West Side Story (2021). Daniel doesn’t want to make the kind of mistake made by Spielberg protagonists like Chief Brody or Tony, respectively, who retreat from their values in the face of social pressure, with tragic consequences. For Jane, it’s not so simple. She reacts to proof of alien life with a mix of compassion and fear. She questions whether Daniel should have stolen the footage, whether Wardex may have had a reason for keeping it secret, and whether its release would upend belief, ethics, and civil order. The fact that she and the villain Scanlon essentially share the same viewpoint is a clever conceit, calling the sanctity of Daniel and Hugo’s good intentions into doubt.

It’s Jane who best embodies a vital Spielbergian theme: the need for human beings to project ecstatic frames of meaning onto the world around them. In Jurassic Park, John Hammond’s monologue is as central to understanding Spielberg’s ethos as anything in The Fabelmans: when he wistfully recalls the imaginary flea circus that led him to build his monstrous park, the scene reveals the risk of imposing imagination onto reality. The theme is similarly present in Captain Miller’s iconic “Earn this” line in Saving Private Ryan, an admission that dying for a moral war still won’t give his life meaning—it must be imposed, or projected, by Private Ryan onto him. Even Spielberg’s misunderstood War Horse (2011) hinges on an ordinary animal that becomes a mirror for humanity’s fears and desires. No wonder that when Disclosure Day’s visitors from outer space reveal themselves, they do it in the guise of animals, convenient facades to “calm” whomever they meet. Jane understands the danger of these illusory conjurings, and how quickly newly revealed aliens could become vessels for projected meaning. Hugo sees them differently, as a vehicle of hope rather than despair: “There is an essential need in all of us to believe, and an equal need to be believed.”

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Therein lies the greatest of Disclosure Day’s irreconcilable differences—the ending. The film reveals that Daniel and Margaret, the apparent apostles of this mission, did not choose their role; it was chosen for them. The aliens abducted them as children and imbued them with special abilities, then sent them as sleeper agents to be activated at the right time and place: Daniel was recruited to steal proof that aliens exist, while Margaret would be their telepathic mouthpiece. The dramatization of their alien-orchestrated childhood abduction—in which they are led to a “Hansel and Gretel” house in the dead of night by birds and beasts—is terrifying; the event left them profoundly damaged. It’s Spielberg’s twisted take on The Manchurian Candidate (1962), in which an even more foreign intelligence deploys rogue agents to change the hearts and minds of their enemies. With a few alterations, Disclosure Day could have been a Frankenheimer-style paranoia thriller or horror movie, about aliens mind-controlling us into submission. From Scanlon’s perspective, that’s the movie they’re already in—even if the aliens were silenced and tortured, they also exploited children to achieve their goals.

It’s here that Disclosure Day works most clearly on a metafictional level, as another of Spielberg’s portraits of the artist. If the semi-autobiographical Fabelmans was Spielberg reckoning with traumas of his childhood, then Disclosure Day feels like his attempt to process the pain of making The Fabelmans. The two leads self-consciously channel Spielberg’s parents (his father an electrical engineer working with early computers, his mother a classical pianist); Hugo plays the role of a director with a film crew, and in a Charlie Kaufman–esque flourish, Daniel and Margaret must enter the latter’s reconstructed home to unlock their memories. Some have drawn parallels to Mysterious Skin (2004), which uses alien abduction as an allegory of child sexual abuse, and to Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal (2022–25), a series about reconstructing personal spaces to confront difficult feelings in a practice setting, but Spielberg already beat them to it. He’s been staging these kinds of “return” scenes for decades, from Hook (1991) to the end of A.I. (2001), where the robot boy David reenters a surreal facsimile of his childhood home as a way to process his Freudian wounds.

More revealing still, when Margaret finally embraces her empathic abilities, she becomes a proverbial filmmaker. To help Daniel escape capture in an earlier scene, she moves through a sea of Wardex employees, reads their minds, and mentally projects herself as an image of someone they love—generating a living home movie for each of them. When they finally broadcast the alien footage around the globe, Daniel and Margaret (with help from the newsroom and Hugo) have become directors, constructing a narrative of how these supreme beings should first be seen.

Taken as a whole, these scenes reflect a Spielberg still processing the contradictory, deeply entangled relationship between the difficulties of his childhood and the gifts he received from them. Disclosure Day simultaneously shows what happened to Daniel and Margaret as an act of chosen-one transcendence and a life-shattering trauma, making them problematically, inseparably, one and the same. It is revealing and honest how Spielberg does not let one resolve the other. After all, if he had never lived through his painful upbringing, or discovered cinema as a means to cope with it, he never would have been able to move millions.

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It’s the presence of these self-reflexive dilemmas within his films that complicate Spielberg’s persona as a sappy magic-of-movies optimist. Spielberg’s films have always reckoned with the uneasy relationship between images and reality. Disclosure Day has been linked with The Post (2017) as a paean to journalism, but it’s closer to Jurassic Park, Minority Report (2002), and Munich as a meditation on the dangerous, DeLilloan power of projected screens. The walls of Wardex headquarters display intrusive surveillance footage, Scanlon must stare at videos of his targets to “dive” upon them, and there is the inescapable presence of upsetting news coverage. World War III seems to be around the corner, a stand-in for all the distressing news beamed out every hour.

Rather than a celebration of movie magic, Disclosure Day suggests that Spielberg wants to reclaim the transformative moral power of the image while bracing for the potential that such a thing is no longer possible—and maybe never was. When Margaret and Daniel broadcast reels of UFO footage and the world watches back, they nearly materialize his wish. Then a flesh-and-blood alien enters the newsroom, and they offer a hushed message in need of translation. Daniel shares that message with Margaret, and she walks toward the station’s news camera. She beckons the world to “listen,” and just as she’s about to reveal the alien’s wisdom, Spielberg cuts to black. Before those pleas for empathy are answered, or the interlocking dialectics resolved, the movie is over.

It is an ending that reverses Spielberg’s perceived practice of projecting meaning back onto his audience. After a career of being accused of manipulating moviegoers, he has used the alien other to redirect that complaint toward the audience, requiring them to make sense of what they have seen and heard—or rather, what they haven’t. People have called the ending ridiculous, beautiful, stupid, amazing, emotional, cheesy, naive, too far and not far enough. They’re all right. It’s an ending that is impossible to discuss without outing yourself as a believer or a cynic, a dreamer or a literalist. It is a ruse and a confrontation, outsourcing to the audience the task of resolving the irreconcilable differences at the heart of Disclosure Day.

For those viewing the titular disclosure—all those faces staring at screens in the climax, the real-life audience watching the movie—Spielberg hints at an answer. Some have questioned how a film so gloriously goofy can leave so many in tears. But watch how the news anchor played by Courtney Grace reacts to the footage: At first, she responds with disbelief, overwhelmed by the sight of little green men. But soon, she sees they’re wounded and dying. They may look cheesy and Roswellian, but her heart still breaks. She’s in tears; she sees herself in them. Beyond the debates over truth and God and the power of image, Spielberg suggests that what matters most is to keep the heart open even when the mind is closed. Spielberg isn’t a naive optimist; the world in Disclosure Day may—or may not—listen. But in this moment of heartlessness and doubt, he’s at least trying to show us the way.