3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Disclosure Day

2026 Steven Spielberg (War of the Worlds) -- download

Spielberg's career was not built on aliens -- he actually has an incredibly varied catalog -- but a number of his movies do focus on aliens coming to Earth, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, of which this one may be seen as a spiritual successor.

Google has a 'Disclosure Day' search result animation - a cardinal. Huh.

Not sure I am going to do a play by play recap of this movie. We know its about "disclosing" the existence of what has to be alien life, even if the trailers don't say it out loud. I mean, I spoiled that in the first sentence. But what is the movie really about ??

"You can't HANDLE the truth!!!" yells Colonel Jessep (Jack Nicholson).

We can't handle the truth. In February of this year, President Donald "Cheeto Benito" Trump signed an executive order to release all the files they had on UFO phenomena, or as they are calling them now - UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena).

Do doo de doo doo.

We handled the truth. There was nothing to be "handled". Even if the fucking US Dept of War official website looks like part of an AR game, this news came and went without even a whisper. The "truth" was just as ambiguous as it always had been. But what if something tangible had been revealed? What if the documents had shown incontrovertible proof that there were alien bodies stored in Area 51 and they had, at the very least, parts of downed alien craft? How would the world have reacted?

In the movie, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, Young Sherlock) of Wardex (Waived Reporting, Development, and Extraction) vehemently states that if said incontrovertible truth about alien existence, in the form of terabytes of footage & files, was released to the world, they would panic, utterly lose their shit. For the movie's world, which is already teetering on the brink of war, it would mean the End of Things. The movie even postulates that religion would collapse, when we learn we are not alone in the universe.

Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor, The Crown), a genius level data scientist in Wardex, believes, and was influenced into believing by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo, The Electric State), an ex-Wardex employee, that the world deserves to know. Needs to know. He believes vehemently that we can handle it, that it is exactly what the world needs now, as it is about to wipe itself out. He has escaped with a backpack full of said data. And Wardex is after him.

Meanwhile, unconnected to Daniel's whistleblower activities, weather person Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt, The Fall Guy) is having a really weird day. After a Disney Princess encounter with a bright red cardinal, things have been... odd. She's guessing what her boyfriend (Wyatt Russell, Overlord) is going to say, before he opens his mouth, and speaking Russian. In the studio she is unphased by her new ability to understand Korean, but collapses after speaking an alien language on-air, for everyone to hear. Something is very wrong.

But Daniel understands what she is saying, when no one else does. So, the two are connected, and are being influenced by Something Bigger Than Them. So much of the movie hinges on the idea that Something Bigger is Happening. Its the driving factor of the movie. Its what propels us towards a climax of the actual release of the files and videos to the entire world, via the news broadcasting framework.

So much of this movie displays as the product of a Very Good Filmmaker. The production budget allows for so much, so many things and Spielberg is able to masterfully engage us. The train scene, for one, is an exciting spin on a classic -- a classic he really subscribes to, as you can easily see this whole thing happening in an Indiana Jones movie. But its also just the lighting and the way he frames a shot. You can easily envision the mock-buster of this movie; I wouldn't be surprised if the idea "an alien conspiracy whistleblower running from a shadowy government agency" is already the plot of one, or many, Straight To movies in the VHS days. I rather enjoyed watching skilled people do their thing.

But in the end, I was, surprisingly to myself, not satisfied with the actual "disclosure". So, they release all this footage to the news, masterfully convincing a bunch of news TV shows to all connect together and show the footage. So what? Most people will think its fake, even if they accept the idea of world covering "breaking news" doesn't happen for AI Deepfakes. And once the governments, including the US Govt which was unaware of what Wardex was doing, get their shit together, it will just quietly become yesterday's news. 

And, what was the alien agenda here? We are meant to believe they a benevolent alien species that lives by empathy instead of tyranny. But what have they been doing for 50 years? Abducting children and subjecting them to terrifying experimentation we know. And I understand that if human interaction like Wardex showed them to be fearful of humans, I get the hiding, but they are still massively technologically advanced compared to us. Do they have to hide? And now, once revealed, what's next? The movie would rather just have us postulate this on our own, as it literally is only about the "disclosure", but since I did not buy into the almost-religious-experience level of awe this was supposed to inspire, I am again left with "so what?" I need to know the answer of that question. 

Kent.