"Disclosure Day" : Steven Spielberg signs a beautiful introspective and humanist film in the form of a futuristic fable

Après The Fabelmans (2023), in which he recounted his childhood, his youth and the birth of his vocation as a filmmaker, Steven Spielberg returns with Disclosure Daya blockbuster which once again features our friends from space. The highly anticipated film arrives in theaters on Wednesday June 10.

Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), cybersecurity expert, former employee of the WARDEX company, left the company in the wake of Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo). They have one objective: to reveal to the world the best-kept state secret of the United States… The existence of extraterrestrials. When the adventure begins, Daniel is surrounded by men armed to the teeth, who seek to recover what Daniel hides in his backpack, and which his attackers try to sell against the release of Jane (Eve Hewson), his girlfriend.

At the same time, in Kansas City, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is the victim of paranormal phenomena after a bird visits her kitchen. What connects Daniel and Margaret? Will they manage to thwart the plans of Noah Scanlon (Collin First), boss of WARDEX, ready to do anything to prevent the truth from coming to light?

This new film by Steven Spielberg, which offers several levels of reading and interpretation, concentrates all the favorites and concerns of the American director since his beginnings: the cosmos, childhood, family, tolerance and cinema in its capacity to amaze us and make us understand who we are. are.

At the forefront of Disclosure Daythere is Steven Spielberg’s passion for the cosmos, and extraterrestrial life, which he has nourished since childhood, after he observed the spectacle of a shower of meteors in the sky of a summer night with his father. The director made it the subject of his very first film, Firelightfilmed in Super 8 at the age of 17. The motif then returns several times in his filmography (Encounter of the Third Kind in 1977, ET the extraterrestrial in 1982, War of the Worlds in 2005). The aliens are back in his new feature film, Disclosure Dayin which the director also portrays Unidentified Abnormal Phenomena (UAP) more widely.

How would humanity react if we were told of the existence of extraterrestrial life? This is the question posed Disclosure Day. Around this question, the film depicts two clans with, on one side, a private company which defends its interests, and the authorities which cover it. This first group knows the truth, and does not wish to reveal it to the world, worried, he says, about the deleterious effects that this news would have on humans. In reality more motivated by the potential profits these extraterrestrials and their advanced technologies hold. And on the other, a handful of resistance fighters, most of them dissidents from the other camp, who wish to inform the world, but also want to put an end to the violence inflicted on beings from elsewhere, tortured without scruple by men greedy for their technologies. These whistleblowers are ready to do anything to let the world know the truth.

The film is nourished by popular culture around this idea that the government knows things, and hides them from the population since 1947, the year of Steven Spielberg’s birth, but also that of the Roswell affair, at the origin of the development of all kinds of conspiracy theories around the existence hidden from the world by the American authorities of the existence of extraterrestrials. In 1977, Steven Spielberg received a letter from NASA refusing to answer his questions when he was preparing his film Encounter of the Third Kindflatly asking him to drop his project. “If NASA takes the time to write me a 20-page letter, it’s because there’s something fishy going on.” declared the director.

His curiosity was piqued again, he said, after reading an article in the New York Times in 2017, revealing that the United States Department of Defense was funding a secret program intended to collect data on UFO sightings by the military. “This article reawakened my curiosity for everything surrounding UFOs and UAPs“, explains Steven Spielberg interviewed by Laurent Delahousse on France 2.

In 2023, hearings set up by an oversight committee of the House of Representatives on the NAPs and “their consequences for national security, the security of the population and the transparency of the government” restart the machine. The director outlines the script of Disclosure Day on his cell phone starting from the end. This 52-page draft was then entrusted to David Koepp (the screenwriter ofIndiana Jones or from War of the Worlds).

Thus all these elements around the question of manipulation, and the truth, here inscribed from the intimate sphere to the political field, irrigate the scenario of Disclosure Day. “People have the right to know the truth“ : this injunction also refers to Trump’s America, and more broadly to today’s world, where manipulation has become, more than ever, a political weapon. But behind this adventure, full of mystery, twists and turns, suspense and special effects, there is also a humanist, even metaphysical, reflection. If he tells us about extraterrestrials, Disclosure Day is primarily interested in humans and our humanity, but also in faith in “something bigger than us”.

The aliens in the film look like us. So much so that we could imagine that they are our cousins ​​or our brothers, among the best of us, who went into space and then returned, much more intelligent and developed. These beings have advanced technology, and above all are gifted with extraordinary empathy, a quality which allows them to put themselves in the place of others, and which, the film suggests, is so cruelly lacking on this earth. We can also read this story as an interior adventure, almost psychoanalytic, which crystallizes in a key scene (which we will not reveal) but which also makes a link with the magic of cinema as a vector of connection with the unconscious.

The film is served by a fabulous soundtrack, by John Williams, 94 years old, Spielberg’s accomplice since his beginnings, and by a brilliant cast. Around Emily Blunt, very convincing in the role of the weather presenter suddenly inhabited by a presence which makes the beings around her transparent and Josh O’Connor in that of the whistleblower, we find Colin First as the boss of cynics, or Eve Hewson in the role of the Daniel’s girlfriend, a former nun, who sees her faith questioned by the revelation of the existence of aliens, also represents resistance to evil and manipulation.

On a formal level, Spielberg brings out the heavy artillery of the blockbuster, without however trying to impress us with it. In an almost outdated aesthetic, the film offers pure moments of emotion, such as the appearance of animals, or this scene which ends the most acrobatic of the sequences, when in a train car full of grand pianos, Margaret overcomes a panic attack upon contact with the vibrations emitted by the strings of a piano. It is in these moments outside of time and speech, where the evocative power of cinema suggests more than it asserts, that the film finds all its strength and beauty.

Disclosure Daywhich is as much a science fiction film as a psychological thriller, an action film, a comedy or even a children’s story, contains the spirit of almost all of the director’s films, from Encounter of the Third Kindà The Fabelmanspassing through ET the extraterrestrial or even Pentagon Papers but also evokes those of the biggest names in the 7th art. With this 37th feature film, Steven Spielberg pays a new tribute to cinema, to its ability to make us dream and to understand who we are, from the most intimate of ourselves to the most universal, by simply inviting us to “listen”.

Genre : Science-Fiction, Thriller
Réalisation : Steven Spielberg
With : Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth
Pays : UNITED STATES
Durée: 2h25
Sortie : June 10, 2026
Distributeur : Universal Pictures International France
Synopsis : What if you discovered that we are not alone? If we showed it to you, proved it to you, would that scare you? People have a right to the truth. It belongs to seven billion people. Every second brings us closer to the inevitable… Disclosure Day.