Of course it’s being touted as Spielberg’s best in twenty years. The guy who made E.T., Jurassic Park, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind has spent the last couple decades veering into BFG and Ready Player One. A grand return to hard sci-fi is no doubt anticipated by audiences excited to see what it’s like to have the rightfully revered filmmaker back on his best beat. There’s no shortage of excitement when a lens flare or a reference to outer space pops up on the silver screen, but for his grand return, Spielberg’s story about government secrets, regular people, and alien invasions feels like a flat trip on the outskirts of different genres mired by unfinished ideas about our world.

Emily Blunt, in what I might deem a career best performance developing a character very out-of-type, is one of two major leads alongside Josh O’Connor who is working really hard to act through his accent. There’s most nothing to connect the vapid but ambitious weather woman to an on-the-run tech genius, but their paths inevitably cross based on some unexplainable universal pull. Daniel (O’Connor) is running from a spooky private contractor tasked by the government with keeping some secret they believe humanity cannot handle. A change of heart leaves him trying to deliver hard drives full of footage to his handler so they can reveal it to the masses. Margaret (Blunt) was a weather woman when she started her day, but after a mysterious visit from a cardinal, she is suddenly able to speak and understand multiple languages, compel people with psychic knowledge, and just knows she has to find Daniel. In the middle is Hugo (Coleman Domingo) trying to support their paths to each other so they can solve something and inform the world of what has been happening on the other side of a dark curtain that even the president hasn’t seen behind.

It’s one part chase movie and one part heady science fiction and manages to spread too far between those things to excel at either. A quiet heady drama about whether the people can or should be ethically given this kind of information is interrupted for oddly shot chase scenes and action sequences that will really remind you you’re not watching Minority Report but something a bit like it. “As good as his other movie” is not a fair or accurate metric but where that movie managed to blend ethics and philosophy into science fiction action, Disclosure Day seems to clunkily ramrod a train sequence into a half-baked idea about ethics and disclosure in an attempt to keep it exciting. Conversations about the ethics are cut off, notions of private companies with government contracts are passing fodder, and the religious subplot to support extra-terrestrial beings is starkly out of place. Sci-fi mumbo jumbo and more interesting expansions on alien powers are left unexplained, and entire world war happens quietly in the background. My best attempt at giving credit to a team as otherwise exceptional as Spielberg and co-writer, David Koepp, is to wonder if it’s about the secrets kept from the masses and how if we were forced to face the visual truth of what actions are doing to harm living things, we might adjust our perspective and actions. Unfortunately, this read puts a lot of faith in the idea that people would immediately trust a leaked alien autopsy.

Disclosure Day is magical because it puts a great back in his wheelhouse and has a wicked actress stretching beyond hers. But its unfortunately confusing morality conversations and flimsy plot devices makes for a bit of a strange slog that’ll make you want to see any other alien come walking out of any other ship.

Disclosure Day hits theaters June 12, 2026.