Powerful as it is, War of the Worlds suffers from a lack of conviction in its final act, in which Tom Cruise’s character pulls off an incredible feat and the American military fights the aliens. However, some (read: this writer) find the ending of the film discordant in a way that highlights the false triumphalism of the presidential administration of the time. War of the Worlds showed why it’s not the aliens that we needed to fear in the 2000s.
With Disclosure Day, Spielberg and Koepp seem ready to do the same for the 2020s. Instead of any plot details, the trailer introduces a variety of characters, including Blunt’s newswoman, Firth’s rich-looking guy, Josh O’Connor as a very earnest-looking man with a backpack, Colman Domingo as someone with an incredible voice, and more. The characters talk vaguely about people needing to know the truth and how there must be more out there than just “us.”
This combination of some nebulous truth hidden from the people, lots of screens, and combinations of the super rich and the devout cannot help but resonate in our time, when we can still mistrust media enough to know images aren’t always truth, and we feel the pull of various economic, religious, and ideological forces on our daily lives.
Yet, we often fail in trying to articulate what those forces are or what we should do about it. When we open our mouths to speak about it, only indecipherable noises come out… not unlike Blunt’s character in Disclosure Day.
Disclosure Day arrives on June 12, 2026.
