Steven Spielberg’s Even Closer Encounters Get Disclosed

Full disclosure: Steven Spielberg’s aliens-are-totally-real conspiracy thriller is a muddle of hyperventilating car chases, childhood trauma-bonding, bad-guy government agents, unexplained doomsday hysteria, and maudlin extrasensory brief encounters. Plus, CGI animals that look like they came out of a Coca-Cola Christmas commercial. Why oh why is this the story that America’s maestro of mass entertainment felt he had to tell?

If memory serves, Spielberg actually made a terrific little movie almost fifty years ago called Close Encounters of the Third Kind that brilliantly captured ordinary citizens desperate for the truth about unexplained phenomena as they resist men-in-black government agents gaslighting the populace. How strange that he felt the need to retread that ground, but only after swapping all the vivid characters, sharp plotting, white-knuckled terror and interstellar awe for a well-intentioned but cloying “can’t we all just get along” kumbaya plea for kindness.

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Disclosure Day ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: David Koepp
Starring: Emily Blunt, John O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo
Running time: 145 mins

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“Empathy is the core of advanced existence,” insists Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), gone-rogue former Director of Biological Assets at shadowy corporation Wardex, which was founded in 1973 (Wikipedia tells me that’s the year ufologists call the “autumn of aliens” due to the half-dozen or so reported real-life alien sightings that happened around the globe). Ever since then, shadowy corporation Wardex has run a tight-lipped organization committed to keeping alien life a secret from humanity. But now, in 2026, Hugo and head tech employee Danny Kellner (Josh O’Connor) have defected from shadowy corporation Wardex, choosing this moment in time to steal all the highly classified video evidence of alien interactions — captured on dozens of slick-looking glass thumb drives — in order to share them with humanity.

Why now? Because “the world is on the brink,” we’re told. Of what? It’s the most tense moment since the Cuban missile crisis. Because why? Something about North Korea! And military bases! “The world is about to blow up in our faces!” another character blurts. Huh? News chyrons mention riots. Where? Never mind that, just clear all the shelves of every gas station in sight. This unexplained global hysteria is the reason that Hugo and Danny are convinced that they need to tell everyone about aliens right now in order to “tip the balance in an already destabilized world.” Never mind that such a disclosure in the midst of a potential World War Three would probably accelerate that destabilization with an avalanche of questions, cosmic queries, finger-pointing, and overall intergalactic pandemonium.

Full Disclosure begins by dropping the audience into a random pro wrestling match (a maladroit message about human savagery, I guess) where Josh O’Connor, clutching a backpack full of secrets, gets fingered by stone-faced agents and whisked out of the arena. Waiting for him outside is a menacing Colin Firth, who tells him that he’s kidnapped his girlfriend Eve Hewson and won’t let her go until he gives them his backpack full of secrets. Then O’Connor pulls out a crystalline stone that looks like a dildo and wields it like a weapon. Beware the dildo!

They call this dildo a “device,” which feels redundant. We know that a dildo is a device! They also recommend wearing a latex glove when handling it and not to clutch it too tightly. The “device,” when handled properly, will rock your world and give you intense out-of-body experiences. If used too much, you might even have a heart attack. Again, this only reinforces the dildo hypothesis.

At this point, the film has not explained who O’Connor is, who Firth is, who Hewson is, or what’s in the backpack. We’re just supposed to be swept up in the high-speed vehicular action. Get to a safe house! Break that satellite burner phone in half! Don’t go to the same place twice! What the fuck is going on? It feels like we missed the first 30 minutes of this movie. The lovers-on-the-run eventually make their way to a monastery, where nuns welcome them with open arms. Why? Because Hewson used to be a novitiate. How super-specific, very rare and amazingly convenient!

So begins an expository data dump that explains O’Connor’s alien data dump. Hewson is former nun Jane Blankenship and is in some kind of relationship with O’Connor that has been going on for an indeterminate amount of time. But they’ve had sex, so she’s definitely not a nun. But she’s still religious, or at least spiritual, which will come in handy for future speechifying about whether aliens will be received as godlike beings.

O’Connor is computer wizard Danny Kellner, an ex-con who served time for cybercrimes before being hired to protect the data of shadowy corporation Wardex — and of course eventually committed cybercrimes by stealing all its data. (Kind of a self-own on the part of shadowy corporation Wardex, but whatever. Don’t hire crooks to protect your shit, bruh!)

Turns out that Colin Firth is Noah Scanlon, the head of shadowy corporation Wardex who will spend the rest of the movie relentlessly hunting them down. He’s got his own “device,” which he pulls out to help him enter Jane’s mind and find their location. One supposedly nail-biter scene is devoted to Scanlon mind-melding with Jane and forcing her to give him GPS directions. When do I make a left? At the red barn? Ten miles east of the highway? Tell me! It’s idiotic.

What shadowy corporation Wardex is or actually does is never explained. All we know is that shadowy corporation Wardex has been reverse-engineering alien technology and that they have the most monitors on all the walls of their control room. Why do they have a control room with more monitors than CENTCOM? No idea. Maybe one of the alien technologies they reverse-engineered is flat-screen TVs? That would explain a lot.

Shadowy corporation Wardex also probes aliens, which is a pretty apt turn of events, since aliens have been probing us for so long. Not too sure why aliens have allowed themselves to be abducted by humans, or why they keep crashing their UFOs into earth. One grainy piece of footage from the late 1960s shows an alien recovered from his spaceship wreckage, propped up and looking woozy. Is he drunk? Is that why he crashed his ride? Another cover-up!

I haven’t mentioned Emily Blunt. She plays Margaret Fairchild, a local Kansas City weather forecaster who gets a visit from an eerie cardinal that gives her the power to speak any language fluently. She also can suddenly read people’s minds and, strangely gifted with the superpower of a paranormal empath, gives them Oprah-worthy sound bites of personal advice and emotional support.

Margaret freaks out everyone at work when she starts making on-camera clicking-gagging sounds on camera before collapsing. The clip goes viral, baffling millions — except Danny, who perfectly understands what she’s saying. “Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know,” he translates. The dialect is math-based (whaa?) and Danny can “speak math.” Anyway, Margaret feels the overriding need to track down Danny, and Danny keeps trying to evade shadowy corporation Wardex, while Hugo orchestrates and referees their blind impulses while he’s in a big warehouse overseeing the construction of what looks like a very cheesy 90s sitcom house.

All will be revealed (disclosed, even) eventually, although the answers to these mysterious circumstances also in involve visitations from a bunch of unconvincing fake woodland creatures (deer, racoon, fox, bird) who are supposed to be the physical manifestations of alien lifeforms. Or something. Danny is fluent in math, Margaret is fluent in people; he’s an “experiencer,” she’s a “passenger.” Just go with it.

There are lots of action shots where black Dodge Chargers race through the streets in hot pursuit before reaching their destination and parking at odd angles. There’s a preposterous scene where our heroes are shoved into a moving freight train full of pianos. There’s a girl who sings “Someday My Prince Will Come” as aliens enter her house. There’s even a moment where Richard Nixon takes a John Candy lookalike to a Florida morgue so they can look at dead E.T.s.

Roswell was real, the government doesn’t want you to know the truth, aliens walk among us, and 79-year-old Spielberg is blowing the lid off of a 79-year-old cover-up by making a breathless movie with a mindless plot. The whole situation is out of this world.