This article contains spoilers for Disclosure Day.
For a movie titled Disclosure Day (review), the new Steven Spielberg film sure keeps things mysterious for most of its 145-minute runtime. Trailers have shown Emily Blunt’s meteorologist Margaret Fairchild speaking in tongues on TV, Josh O’Connor’s cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner on the run with a black backpack, and some pointed shots of animals. But that’s pretty much it, though the overwhelming suspicion is that following in the footsteps of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (as well as War of the Worlds and sort of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), this is yet another Spielberg alien movie. And the title definitely implies that the existence of aliens gets disclosed — perhaps not during nighttime, but during the day.
Well, it does happen during nighttime; shows what you know! But more importantly, the actual disclosure of alien life, while the climax of the film, is far and away one of the least consequential points of the plot, at least on the micro level. On the macro level? It changes the world, or at least has the potential to do so. But if you’re wondering what Disclosure Day is actually about, you might still be flummoxed after leaving the theater, so we’ll attempt to explain what it’s about from a plot level, then break down what it likely means from a thematic level.
This is: Disclosure Day Disclosure Day, where we disclose what Disclosure Day is really all about. Day.
What Disclosure Day Is Actually About: The Plot Explained
If you want a full plot summary, a site called “Wikipedia” exists and it’s pretty cool, so check it out. Instead of going beat by beat through the whole thing, we’re going to do our best to lay this out in chronological order and fill in the gaps in terms of what happened in the movie, which somewhat gets left up to the viewer to interpret. And because this is our interpretation, you may have intuited different things that are going on here.
The events of the movie actually go all the way back to the 1940s and Roswell, though that’s only what we see in the footage released to the world at the end of the film; it’s possibly a longer span of time. Regardless, the Roswell crash was indeed an alien spaceship, and it was far from the last encounter humans — and Americans in particular — had with the little grey aliens with the big eyes. Over the decades, multiple other crafts have crashed and successfully landed, which is something the US government has kept secret for years.
Or rather, it was initially the US government, up until President Nixon brought an actor friend to check out a few alien corpses. At that point, Wardex, a corporation run for at least the past 35 years by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) realized that Presidents become civilians after eight years (not exactly true, but moving on), so began to leave them out of the circle of trust. Wardex, an independent government contractor, became the sole steward of all alien knowledge and technology, using it to progress tech in the outside world, torture aliens, and hold three cylindrical artifacts that can do anything from make a man teleport to control minds to essentially work as a TV remote. That last one is less impressive, though it is the final thing we see an artifact do in the movie, so your mileage may vary on how exciting that is.
While Wardex has been studying and dissecting these alien visitors, they’ve continued to visit us. In 1996, they took two people to their ships: younger versions of Margaret and Daniel. Appearing as animals like an elk, a raccoon, and a cardinal so that the children wouldn’t be scared, they led Margaret to an old fairytale-looking house where it snows upside down outside and fundamentally changed both Margaret and Daniel, granting them fantastic abilities.
Those abilities boil down to telepathy and linguistics, respectively, though they take more forms than that. However, while the movie doesn’t explicitly state this out loud, it seems after the encounter with the aliens, Margaret likely read her father’s mind and ran away from him — the event was so traumatic that she suppressed her abilities for years. Daniel simply cannot remember his childhood and also suppressed his abilities until one of the aliens in animal guise looked in on him during college when he was a hard-partying almost dropout, unlocking his power to read math like a language and allowing him to get hired by Wardex. Daniel didn’t know that aliens had gifted him a power, or that he had a power at all; the only thing Daniel knew was that he could suddenly understand complex math and code.
At Wardex, Daniel met Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), a man who works with extraterrestrial biology and who communicated directly with the aliens. At some point, one of the aliens escaped (who we see towards the end of the movie), and began to manipulate events behind the scenes to lead up to Disclosure Day. Along with Hugo, that alien hatched a complex plan to bring Margaret and Daniel back together so they could activate their Wonder Twins powers and reveal the truth about aliens to the world. Why? We’ll get more into that in the next section, but the major argument throughout the movie is that the knowledge of aliens does not belong to a secretive government-adjacent company or cabal — it belongs to the eight billion people who live on planet Earth.
That plan was to have a section of Wardex employees defect on moral grounds and begin building a scale replica of Margaret’s childhood home. Hugo and company were aware that Margaret had powers, but they were waiting for her to be activated… which she is, by one of the aliens masquerading as a cardinal. That leads to the events we see in the movie, where Margaret and Daniel loop their way around multiple times until they come to Hugo’s version of Margaret’s house, all built to allow her to confront the trauma of her alien abduction and get ready for — you guessed it — Disclosure Day.
And that does happen, as Hugo and company bring Margaret to KCXE in Kansas City, dump all the footage of every alien encounter for nearly three-quarters of a century onto the world, and reveal the existence of aliens among us. But as to what the movie is about, it’s to bring Daniel and Margaret — two halves of the same alien experiment — together, make them face their trauma, and come out better and more confident people for it. It’s also so the escaped alien can whisper something to Daniel, who translates it for Margaret, who then goes and tells the world, “listen.” The end!
What Disclosure Day Is Actually About Thematically
There are a lot of themes that Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp (Spielberg came up with the story) are playing with throughout the movie, including the role of government in our daily lives, the intersection of religion and science, and whether Josh O’Connor can stay completely hidden behind a fence even though it’s see-through (he can, apparently). But the most important one, or ones, are likely the reasons behind Daniel and Margaret’s powers: communication and empathy.
One plot point we haven’t mentioned yet is that throughout the movie, World War III is slowly bubbling in the background. North Korea is definitely involved, as is Russia and the United States. While we don’t find out too much about the conflict other than the danger the world is in, to the point that it seems global nuclear catastrophe might begin overnight, the point of comparison that gets called out early in the movie is the Cuban Missile Crisis. The abbreviated version of that real-world conflict is that it was a 13 day stand-off between the US and Russia over the placement of nuclear weapons that (seriously) almost led to the destruction of the world until finally communication and — get this — empathy triumphed over military might.
You can likely see where this is going, but there are direct parallels to nearly every aspect of our world today, and Spielberg is urging humans to simply talk to each other logically and then hear each other emotionally. It’s no coincidence that what the alien ultimately wants to convey, which Margaret provides as the literal final word of the movie, is: “Listen.” That’s not just the alien telling the world this, or queuing up a longer speech with instructions on how to build our own starships (though it certainly could be that as well). The shot has Blunt looking in the camera at the audience and telling us in the real world to listen — to each other, to reason, to the mathematical language of the universe, to truth and science. All of that.
In case you don’t quite buy this as an interpretation, check out how Noah, the villain of the movie, acts. He exerts control over others both through conventional means and also by using one of the alien artifacts to physically control others like a puppet. Whenever he confronts anyone, from Daniel to Hugo in particular, he talks about how their actions have hurt him, and how upset and disappointed it made him feel. There’s no empathy coming from him, no attempt to understand why they’re doing the things they’re doing. If he professes to care about his former co-workers so deeply, wouldn’t there be more, well, listening going on? That’s also how they ultimately beat him, by getting him in a scenario where he’s completely lost control. And rather than blast him with a ray gun or get him arrested, his defeat is shown by him sitting down, no longer talking, and merely focusing on Margaret addressing the world.
So yes, Disclosure Day isn’t about aliens — not really. It’s about how humans treat the other, whether it’s people from another country, another background, co-workers, or merely other people we’re in a relationship with. It’s about how we can bridge those divides with two simple tricks: communication and empathy. Or to put it simply?
Listen.