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If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? This summer, the truth belongs to eight billion people. Today is … Disclosure Day.
Based on a story by Steven Spielberg, the screenplay is by David Koepp, whose previous work with Spielberg includes the scripts for Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Combined, those films earned more than $3 billion worldwide. Koepp also wrote the script for 2025’s Jurassic World Rebirth.
In 1977, Steven Spielberg captured the public’s imagination with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, inspiring a sense of wonder, awe and hope for what might come from contact with life from beyond our planet. Now, he presents a thriller that serves as a thematic bookend to his seminal sci-fi masterpiece. “During Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I would say to myself: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all of this turned out to be true?’” Spielberg says. ”Almost 50 years later, I’m now thinking: ‘Wouldn’t be it be wonderful for us to actually know that all of this is true?’ ”
REVIEW
Disclosure Day poses provocative questions about the mysteries of human existence—and the cost to our humanity when answers to those mysteries are kept secret—in the form of a fast-paced, inventively conceived action movie.
The film represents the latest expression of Spielberg’s fascination with what he calls “the great unknowns of the cosmos” that dates back to childhood and a father who introduced him to both science fiction and the hard science of astronomy. “I remember one summer, my dad took me out to look at the annual Perseid meteor shower when we were living in New Jersey,” Spielberg says. “Overnight, I developed a real curiosity about what is happening up there in the stars, on some planet orbiting in any number of countless solar systems, and if one of them might have a civilization that was advanced enough to travel the universe.”
That wondrous curiosity about otherworldly possibilities fueled the launch of Spielberg’s filmmaking career. In 1964, at the age of 17, he enlisted the help of family, friends, and classmates to make a two hour and twenty-minute feature using Super 8mm cameras entitled Firelight, about a group of scientists investigating unidentified flying objects. ”My first UFO movie,” Spielberg says. Others would follow, produced with much more sophisticated cameras: Close Encounters, which earned him the first of his nine Academy Award® nominations for directing; E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), a global sensation that turned its endearingly benevolent titular character into an enduring pop icon; and War of the Worlds (2005), an adaptation of the classic H.G. Wells novel and the darkest of the films in Spielberg’s subgenre of stargazing sci-fi.
While not a sequel to Close Encounters (sorry, Internet), Disclosure Day harkens back to it with a story that deals with a specific, recurring theme in the cultural lore of “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (or UAPs, the preferred new century term for UFOs): efforts by the government to conceal the truth about it or discourage interest in it. Spielberg can testify to such machinations. Back when he was prepping Close Encounters, he received a letter from NASA declining a request for technical assistance, and more, asking him to cancel it altogether. “I really found my faith when I heard that the government was opposed to the film,” said Spielberg in a 1978 interview. “If NASA took the time to write me a 20-page letter, then I knew there must be something happening.”
Spielberg previously dramatised the dangers and price of truth-squelching secrecy with his Oscar-nominated 2017 drama The Post, which chronicled the efforts of journalists of the early seventies to publish the “Pentagon Papers,” a suppressed assessment of the Vietnam War conducted by the State Department that concluded the United States was sure to fail at achieving its goals in the region.
Spielberg’s decision to revisit these concerns—this time as they pertained to the military’s knowledge of UAPs—was inspired by a front-page story in The New York Times in December of 2017 entitled “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money:’ The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” The report revealed that the Defense Department had been funding a secret military intelligence program to investigate UAPs and the report included video taken by Navy fighter jets of specific close encounters with inexplicable aircraft. The bombshell article ended by quoting the former director of the program stating that such evidence “is not something any government or institution should classify in order to keep secret from the people.”
“That article blew up my interest again in the whole UFO/UAP phenomenon,” Spielberg says. “I wasn’t alone. When that story came out, it grabbed the attention of people who never believed in UFOs to begin with, and so many more of us who have always believed that something’s been going on that we just simply haven’t been told. I think people’s questions about what’s going on—in our skies; in our world; with reality itself—has reached a critical mass of complete fascination. Are we alone or not? And if the government knows, why haven’t we been told? And that is what got me wondering if maybe it was time for another story in my canon of extraterrestrial stories that I have been involved in throughout my whole career.”
Spielberg had some other stories to tell first, namely Ready Player One (2018), West Side Story (2021), and The Fabelmans (2022), the latter two earning him Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director.
In July of 2023, as he began considering his next project, the United States Congress helped him make up his mind when a House oversight committee began holding high-profile hearings on UAPs titled, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency.”
Activated, Spielberg began to write a story in the Notes app on his phone. “I began at the end,” Spielberg says. “Ironically, that’s how I started writing Close Encounters, too: I started with the last scene, then backed up and figured how to earn that ending, with characters that can take us on a very identifiable journey through all the mystery toward a final act of communion. As he tapped out the tale that would eventually be titled Disclosure Day, Spielberg would share updates with key associates, including his longtime producing partner, Kristie Macosko Krieger. “Every day I would get something sent to me from his Notes app,” Macosko Krieger says. ”It would just be a little bit longer and a little bit more, teasing us every single day with pieces. We found ourselves going: ‘What is this? What is going to happen next? And at the end of two or three months, we had a treatment for a new thriller written by Steven Spielberg that was 52 pages in a Notes app on the iPhone.”
Once Spielberg had finished a rough draft, he shared the story with Koepp. “I thought it was extraordinary,” says Koepp, who, at the time, was deep into writing Jurassic World Rebirth for Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. “Steven knew exactly what he wanted to say. He had a lot of specifics and a lot of huge ideas. Most of the characters and plot were there and the last act was just perfect. I gave him thoughts and urged him to write it himself, but he felt like he wanted a collaborator. And because I just could not stop thinking about it, when he asked me if I would step in and write the script, I agreed to take it on after I finished Rebirth.”
One thing Koepp found so compelling about Spielberg’s treatment was how it wanted to present all of the story’s heady ideas in the form of a seventies-era conspiracy thriller. “It’s one of my favorite genres,” says Koepp, citing director Sydney Pollack’s 1975 classic Three Days of the Condor starring Robert Reftord and Faye Dunaway, as a particular touchstone. “They are intense movies that are essentially about the truth. There is a character who wants to tell the truth, and there are a bunch of allied interests who very much want to stop that from happening. Here, the truth pertains to whether or not aliens have visited us. That is material Steven has explored in previous films before, or course, but they are all strikingly different from one another in style and tone. Similarly, while this movie is in conversation with his other films, it is also a new take from him. I think people will debate how much of this is science fiction or how much of it is, or could be, science fact. From my writing perspective, I would describe it as a sci-fi thriller.”
In turning Spielberg’s treatment into a screenplay, Koepp began by fleshing out the two lead characters: Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a television journalist who does the weather for a local Kansas City station and is ready for new and better opportunities in her field; and Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity expert for WARDEX, a shadowy agency within the military industrial complex that safeguards evidence about alien visitation dating back to the Roswell incident of 1947. (The name WARDEX stands for “Waived Reporting, Development and Extraction.” “Waived reporting” is a term for government-affiliated agents or groups that are not required to submit data, documents or any kind of accountability reporting to a regulatory agency. Koepp discovered the term while researching the transcripts of the Congressional hearings on UAPs.)
Margaret and Daniel each share a special connection to the secret history held under WARDEX’s command, but their recollection of that history is fuzzy, and what they do remember they do not understand. To decipher their cryptic pasts so they can properly act on the secrets they hold, they must trust the help of peculiar allies with their own agendas while also evading powerful forces determined to stop them by any means necessary.
“Steven was very insistent on making our heroes and all the characters as rich and complex as possible,” Koepp says. “He was always asking: ‘Who are these people? Let’s find the details and bits of behavior that can express a very specific character, not just a functional archetype.’ Margaret and Daniel are, to some degree, special ‘chosen one’ heroes, but Steven was adamant that they should always be relatable while always remaining interesting. Characters who have secrets are great fun to write and fun for the audience. They keep you leaning forward to find out what those secrets are. Even better is a character who is a mystery to themselves, because that is a compelling problem to have. There are people who have the answers that Margaret and Daniel seek. But first, they have to decide if they actually want those answers, because there is always great risk involved in unlocking hidden truths about yourself. So there are layers of mystery and personal drama in the story, which I really like, as both a writer and as a viewer.”
Koepp was equally attentive to key supporting characters: Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the autocratic head of WARDEX who believes the knowledge his agency protects would destabilize human civilization if it was made public; Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), once a WARDEX true believer, now an enigmatic ally to Daniel and Margaret; and Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), a former nun and Daniel’s partner, whose religious perspective frames the stakes for what the revelations of “disclosure day” could mean for the world. “We went through an interesting process of writing and rewriting, where we focused on one of the main characters,” says Koepp. “There was a Daniel draft, a Margaret draft, a Jane draft, a Hugo draft, a Scanlon draft. Every character got a pass through the script where we thought about the entire story from their perspective. The characters really came to life in that process.”
The sci-fi elements in Disclosure Day were inspired by real-world lore about UAP-related phenomenon and government weird-science programs: the Roswell incident; crop circles; recovered memories of alien encounters; CIA research into remote viewing (psychic surveillance); military experimentation with recovered alien technology; and much more.
“The movie plays to what people know because the whole idea is that powerful forces have been covering it up and trying to convince people that what we have heard over the years is not true,” Koepp says. “So it was important to Steven to not deviate wildly from the stories we have been told. That said, we also wanted to bring our own imaginations to it, so we have a lot of original ideas that riff on established tropes.”
Perhaps the most significant of those riffs inspired many of Disclosure Day’s most imaginative sequences: a piece of advanced tech known as “the device,” which can produce a variety of effects depending on the user, but which no one truly understands. In the hands of Scanlon, it is a mind-control weapon, producing moments of surreal and scary psychic warfare. In Margaret’s hands, it is a means of self-defense and a portal to exploring her past. “If you go down the rabbit hole of UFO lore,” Spielberg says, ”you find all this speculation that various technological advances we have made as a civilization owe their existence to technology that has been salvaged from crashed UAP craft and then reverse- engineered by humans. That is all speculative, but the idea has always been interesting to me. I had this idea that I thought would serve the story and enrich the themes of the story for a piece of tech that WARDEX has never been able to analyze. It is definitely not a magic wand or a weapon, but Scanlon uses it like one. It was made to do so many other better things.”
Disclosure Day’s high concept set-pieces are balanced by more grounded yet equally riveting sequences. In addition to being modeled after conspiracy thrillers of the seventies, the film is often an old-fashioned race-against-time road movie with intense car chases and stunts. “I certainly thought that this story needed to have a couple of jet engines strapped onto it and that it needed to take the audience on a ride that would blow their hair back,” Spielberg says. “I wanted that to begin from the very first frame and conclude in a 20-minute finale that would bring everyone to a united epiphany about what has been happening in the world, what has been kept from us and what we now know.”
Among the movie’s intricately staged action sequences is a set-piece involving a train collision. It is a scene that Spielberg aficionados might view as something of a full-circle moment for the director, as his first experiments with filmmaking as a kid (dramatized in the semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans) involved crashing toy trains and recording them with a Super 8 mm camera.
As Spielberg himself explains it, the Disclosure Day train sequence fulfills an idea he has wanted to put on screen since Duel, his first studio feature, produced by Universal as a TV movie in the United States and released as a theatrical film in other countries. “The TV version was 74 minutes long, but to qualify for international release as a feature it needed to be 90 minutes, so Universal let me go off and shoot an extra 16 minutes,” Spielberg says. “I came up with ideas for all these scenes. One of them was going to be that the mysterious truck that is stalking Dennis Weaver’s character pulls up behind his car and starts to push him into a moving freight train. Now, in Duel, the train passes and Dennis Weaver’s car never gets hit. But with Disclosure Day, I got to do what I really wanted to do with that sequence.”
The themes and ideas of Disclosure Day resonate in various ways with current events (the story is set against the backdrop of a fictitious geopolitical crisis that risks a world war), and ongoing cultural debates about secrecy and transparency, autocracy and democracy, ideological conflict and open-minded empathy, religion and science, and the use and abuse of technology.
But Koepp says that throughout the two-year writing process, the priority was always to craft compelling characters and a thrilling yarn and to let relevancy and meaning emerge organically. “Steven’s goal in any movie is to explore human nature, regardless of genre, text, theme,” Koepp says. He wants to know, “’Can I discover something true about these characters? Can I put characters on the screen that people relate to in some way and how can I do that in a cinematic way?’” There is never really any talk of grand themes going into the work. We are just trying to tell the best story we can and create the most believable people we can. And if we do that well, interesting themes will arise. But that cart can’t go before that horse.”
For Spielberg, the interesting themes that did rise to the surface transformed a story inspired by real close encounters with unidentified anomalous phenomena into a broader statement that speaks to urgent needs and issues of our moment. “Disclosure Day is a movie about misinformation and the challenge of finding truth in a culture when powerful people have tools to blur the lines of fact and fiction, of what is real and unreal, in service of protecting and advancing their agendas,” Spielberg says. “It’s a movie that also asks questions about what we do with truth that expands our understanding of the universe in a way that challenges the beliefs that give us meaning, including religion. The X-Files taught us that the truth is out there, but what happens when we find it? Can we accept it? Do we reject it? Will it bring us together or divide us further? Ultimately, though, I think Disclosure Day is a story about empathy as an extraordinary resource, and how it needs to be shared globally, with the entire world, not hoarded for self-interest or reserved for those closest to us.”
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