Steven Spielberg's newest film opens Thursday, and critics are already calling it a return to form. Disclosure Day, a sci-fi thriller about a government conspiracy to hide intelligent alien life from the public, opened to reviews on June 9. After 138 reviews, it sits at 84 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 74 on Metacritic.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film follows a small group determined to expose the truth to a world on the brink of war. The cast includes Josh O'Connor, Emily Blunt, Colman Domingo, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson and Wyatt Russell. Spielberg's longtime collaborators are all present: cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, editor Sarah Broshar, composer John Williams, and screenwriter David Koepp.
The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney gave the film a strong review, writing that "no living director better understands the magic of movies." Rooney noted the film's "shared DNA [that] can easily be traced to Close Encounters and E.T. But as is fitting for a filmmaker pushing 80, awestruck innocence now co-exists with a more ruminative maturity, especially when touching on the secrecy, manipulation and deception of governmental power." He also drew a line to an earlier Spielberg film, writing that "as much as Spielberg's early sci-fi, the new film kept taking me back to the moral and philosophical questions posed by 2002's brilliant Minority Report."
Rooney also pointed to the film's thematic ambitions, writing that "there are allegories that can be read about fear of the unknown breeding cruelty and exploitation, but Disclosure Day is first and foremost a propulsive yarn with thematic roots in hope, truth, empathy and perhaps even spirituality."
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave it four stars, calling it a "very enjoyable and entirely ridiculous space-alien conspiracy adventure" that is "cheerfully mischievous and deadly serious in equal measure." Bradshaw noted that "only Spielberg could get away with taking two of the world's best-known hoaxes — Roswell and crop circles — and treating them with judicious deadpan respect." He also wrote that "with heartfelt idealism, Spielberg also asks us to believe that should the ultimate truth come out, people everywhere would be terribly upset at the way captured aliens have been vivisected."
IndieWire's David Ehrlich also weighed in positively, acknowledging the film as essentially a "fun and goofy popcorn movie" while still praising Spielberg's sincerity in making it. The consensus across reviews points to a filmmaker still capable of blending spectacle with substance.
Disclosure Day opens in theaters worldwide on June 12.
