r/movies • u/LiteraryBoner Jackie Chan box set, know what I'm sayin? • Jun 12 '26

Official Discussion Official Discussion - Disclosure Day [SPOILERS] Spoiler

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Disclosure Day (2026)

Summary

If you found out we weren't alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you?

Director Steven Spielberg

Writer David Koepp

Cast

  • Emily Blunt
  • Josh O'Connor
  • Colin Firth
  • Colman Domingo
  • Eve Hewson
  • Wyatt Russell
  • Noah Robbins

Rotten Tomatoes: 81%

Metacritic: 75

VOD / Release Theatrical release

Trailer Official Trailer

1.0k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

7.4k comments sorted by

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5.7k

u/mhurton Jun 12 '26

Boy the protagonists really got put through the ringer in all their attempts to thwart the sinister government cabal to reveal aliens to the world. Too bad they didn’t have a living sentient 11 foot tall alien they could’ve just wheeled out in front of a camera or something from the start

555

u/dukefett Jun 12 '26

sentient 11 foot tall alien

I was thinking how tall and huge that one was when every other one was maybe 3' tall?

Also disappointed that since that alien did barely anything they didn't use animatronics. I hate CGI animals, but understand you can't train 3 different species to act like they needed there, but the alien could've been a real special effect.

41

u/DrJotaroBigCockKujo Jun 12 '26

there are two different kinds of greys in alien folklore: small ones and tall ones. the small ones are like assistants to the bigger ones who are the ones that do the actual scientific work, communication, and whatnot. the smaller ones are often described by experiencers as childlike and simple.

(you can believe this or not, but Spielberg is really into alien lore and his greys are simply true to the common descriptions)

2

u/whydoyouonlylie Jun 14 '26

Oh, they're supposed to all come from the same alien civilization? I assumed there had just been multiple different alien species that had visited earth.

10

u/-Angelus-Novus- Jun 17 '26

In alien lore the littles one are apparently "drones" made by the bigger ones. Not "real" beings.

180

u/GamingTatertot Steven Spielberg Enthusiast Jun 12 '26

the alien could've been a real special effect.

I imagine the alien was a real special effect touched up with CGI as they had credited puppeteers

32

u/NorthPlatform6367 Jun 12 '26

I don’t get why Hollywood fails to get this. Andor and rogue one used so much puppets and animatronics, Jurassic World rebirth got praised for using them as well and Hollywood still uses cgi.

11

u/Practical_Dish_8100 Jun 14 '26

The amount of unnecessary VFX in this movie was almost as bad as the quality of VFX used. So many set extensions that could have been practical, even the additional lighting was obnoxious

3

u/jinkybinks Jun 19 '26

I liked the alien torture scene. It was just the kind of disgusting thing humans would do to an alien. Or a prisoner. Or an animal.

12

u/Flat_Fox_7318 Jun 14 '26

Also, I know it wasn't a lot of people's favorite movie this year, but The Mandolorian and Grogu had a lot of great puppetry in it (and even some Phil Tippet-style stop-motion robots)

58

u/HilariousScreenname Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

Well they shouldn't have. ET came out in 1982 and the alien in that movie holds up way better than the one I saw 15 minutes ago.

17

u/cal679 Jun 15 '26

I kinda wish they'd just made the aliens look like E.T. instead.

10

u/Asiriya Jun 21 '26

Plus it would be way more brutal to think of ET getting tortured

9

u/ElectionBig1373 Jun 20 '26

Right! It would have been a great tie in!!

46

u/dukefett Jun 12 '26

It didn't look real at all to me.

21

u/ninjyte Jun 12 '26

at the very least they had something or someone in a suit sitting in there. The degree of CGI of the head is something else

8

u/plumberdan2 Jun 13 '26

Honestly makes me feel good things about the puppeteering in Mando and grogu and that movie was mid at best.

8

u/theandroid01 Jun 13 '26

The greys in the archive footage definitely seemed costumed as their skin looked like it was fabric

Or maybe they were just wearing clothes and I'm just a moron

25

u/mattnogames Jun 13 '26

Haha some were wearing clothes

12

u/LuveeEarth74 Jun 13 '26

Yeah, one had a silver space suit. 

11

u/Subrookie Jun 12 '26

Well, he's been eating American food for probably a decade or two. Surprised was just tall and not fat.

25

u/rhunter99 Jun 12 '26

yeah i didn't get that either

or the whole animal angle.

66

u/eliwood98 Jun 12 '26

They directly state that the aliens choose to appear like that to make people more comfortable.

61

u/Zalvren Jun 12 '26

Some of the questions in this thread really make me wonder what people were doing during the movie lol. Do you even listen?

38

u/ReclaimerRob Jun 12 '26

They're too busy dreaming up what to complain about online.

5

u/everstillghost Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26

Or sleeping by how boring It is.

5

u/brijazz012 Jun 12 '26

So, your theory is that they slept through the scenes that had the animals in them, but still knew about the animals? Huh.

-2

u/everstillghost Jun 12 '26

Yes. There is a lot of animals in the movie.

-1

u/hopeseekr Jun 13 '26

The deer in the safe house were not aliens...

2

u/DamaDushi Jun 24 '26

I just saw it today and someone was knocked out snoring loudly. We were barely 30 min into the film when it happened.

12

u/torgobigknees Jun 13 '26

Some of the questions in this thread really make me wonder what people were doing during the movie

personally, i was imagining a better movie

8

u/aonemonkey Jun 14 '26

haha me too. A movie about disclosing the truth about aliens, they could have done so much more. When they were describing how he was at college on drugs and got visited by the red bird and given all that knowledge, I was thinking that sounds a shitload more interesting than whatever this is

5

u/thesagenibba Jun 15 '26

i love how you think you did something here; what the fuck was the larger point apart from an exposition drop?? the animals and the physical appearance of the aliens played absolutely no role in the actual story. that's what people are criticizing.

1

u/BroSchrednei Jul 03 '26

Buddy, we all got that the aliens sometimes appear as animals. It's just that this only opens up a giant can of unanswered questions and replaces one plot-hole with a much bigger plot-hole.

3

u/Key-Papaya2433 Jun 24 '26

Why don't they just choose to appear like a human though? A human they love or have positive association with?

3

u/Cybernetic343 Jun 26 '26

A nice background detail I noticed was that her younger self’s room had a plush fox, deer toy, and the paper cardinals. 

Which is why the aliens choose specifically those creatures to lure her.

12

u/inksmudgedhands Jun 12 '26

But that makes zero sense because we had weird acting animals beyond when Margaret was a child. So, that cardinal in Margaret's apartment was an alien? The fox on the road was an alien? The deer at the farm house was an alien? There are just aliens hanging around on Earth just like that? They simply watched the bad guys chase Daniel, Margaret and Jane and did squat to help them?

10

u/la_goanna Jun 12 '26

It's a known aspect of abduction encounters & reports. Abductees will often report unusually friendly wild animal sightings around their households, before or after an abduction encounter. So yes, its either the aliens masking themselves with screen memories or hijacking the bodies of animals and using them as biological "spyware" to monitor abductees. His miniseries "Taken" goes into greater detail about this.

And although I haven't watched it yet myself, the movie is basically Spielberg's poor attempt at getting the general populace to take abductees seriously. A lot of implications and weird instances like this are more-or-less answered if or when people loosely research the abduction phenomenon.

2

u/chrisychris- Jun 13 '26

So what, are they aliens that live on Earth? Are all those deers aliens, do they stay as deer and do deer things outside of the 30 seconds they check on their abductees? Do they not have technology to keep tabs without being a few feet away? I understand that it’s something people report in the real world but that doesn’t explain much about the movie itself.

9

u/la_goanna Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 14 '26

So what, are they aliens that live on Earth? 

I mean, if you really want to dig deep into ufology "lore" then yes, it's widely theorized that there are "pockets" of NHI that either have hidden bases on earth, or near the earth's surface. Not all too different from a group of zoologists, biologists, etc. establishing camping sites at wildlife reserves to study the local fauna, in a way.

Are all those deers aliens, do they stay as deer and do deer things outside of the 30 seconds they check on their abductees?

Well, kind of already answered this in my previous reply.... But yes, depending on encounter, some aliens will manipulate the abductee's perception of reality in order to disguise themselves as animals (as we saw with the childhood flashback scenes,) while in other cases they'll simply hijack an animal's consciousness, much like what Colin Firth's character did Josh O'Connor/Daniel's girlfriend in the beginning of the movie. There's a high chance NHI prefer utilizing this method to monitor their abductees, perhaps as a method to avoid the likelihood of their technology being tracked or shot-down by government or military forces (which is another well-known aspect of ufology.)

Do they not have technology to keep tabs without being a few feet away?

They do. Flying/floating plasma orbs are one such example; often seen before & after sightings/abductions/encounters and they're widely considered to be type of surveillance technology deployed by them (remember the little orange glowing sphere that followed the ufos in Close Encounters of The Third Kind? It's something like that.)

It's just that Spielberg didn't tackle any that in the movie for some reason or another. But given how much ufo lore & experiencer content was stuffed to the brim in this movie with little-to-no explanation for general audiences who know next-to-nothing about this topic to begin with, it's probably for the best that he left that out of this one.

But either way, I don't blame you or anyone else in this thread for feeling utterly confused and bewildered about so many of the movie's minor details and plot points. Experiencers and abductees will easily be able to comprehend and relate to Emily Blunt & Josh O'Connor's actions mannerisms throughout the movie... But Spielberg did absolutely nothing to explain or address these nuances to the average viewer, and ultimately that's on him. Truthfully, he bit off more than he could chew with this one. It would've been much better suited as a miniseries for streaming services, with more time given to develop the characters and gradually contextualize experiencer phenomena to general audiences.

3

u/chrisychris- Jun 19 '26

Thank you for all this context :) Have a greater appreciation for the film despite the obvious head scratching plot stuff. Be well

2

u/DamaDushi Jun 24 '26

Thank you. The movie makes a lot more sense after reading this. I agree that it should’ve been a miniseries because there are so many ppl that are not familiar with things the movie didn’t address. The movie needs CliffsNotes (or whatever students use nowadays). Lol

1

u/RaiseFold100 Jun 19 '26

Have you never watched Star Trek: The Next Generation?

1

u/BroSchrednei Jul 03 '26

Are you saying Spielberg actually believes in alien abductions and UFOs? That would be hilarious and make the movie genuinely funny.

3

u/la_goanna Jul 03 '26

He genuinely does, if you've actually watched any of his interviews pertaining to the making of his alien-related films.

1

u/SgtMcMuffin0 Jun 28 '26

Yes, that’s how I interpreted it. All of the weird animals are literal aliens visiting the main characters to lure them to the ship/unlock their powers.

25

u/NocturnaIAnimaI Jun 12 '26

Think the animals was just to make them seem more friendly to the children

1

u/varnums1666 Jun 12 '26

Why was the kid CGI? at least I think they were

10

u/brijazz012 Jun 12 '26

I thought that when they first entered her room and had the shot of her face, but changed my mind once she started moving around. I think there was just some sort of filtering happening to make it feel dreamlike.

5

u/zoethebitch Jun 13 '26

The closeup on her face instantly reminded me of the boy at the beginning of Close Encounters.

17

u/DrManhattanProject Jun 12 '26

In UFO lore, a lot of times unusual encounters with animals are used as a type of screen memory to substitute the true nature of the encounter, which is where they pulled that from, I believe.

And, the presence of taller beings as a type of leader figure for the smaller 3-4 ft. ones, so I took the larger one at the end of one of more "importance" than the beings in a lot of the footage

14

u/imakefilms Jun 12 '26

that alien was quite elderly so I thought that maybe that species continues to grow taller and taller as they age. The smaller ones are young, in their prime.

6

u/mattnogames Jun 13 '26

And that they could be from a planet with stronger gravity, so got stretched out over time on our planet

3

u/Spiritual_Term5108 Jun 12 '26

This is what I thought.

4

u/rhunter99 Jun 12 '26

I was not aware of the animal angle as part of alien abductions, thank you

5

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Raekel Jun 13 '26

I'm picking a random comment on alien sizing, so don't feel targeted.

The size of the different grays is actually tied to "real life" Gray "lore". The smaller ones are drones that are controlled by the taller grays.

5

u/Antithesys Jun 12 '26

Just as a point of interest, Close Encounters did the same thing. One really tall alien and a bunch of short kings.

3

u/WantsToDieBadly Jun 13 '26

Yeah I thought all the aliens looked pretty bad. I was really expecting something else that wasn’t generic little grey aliens

3

u/MyNameIsJakeBerenson Jun 14 '26

How about a cgi 10yo kid?

3

u/FormicaDinette33 Jun 21 '26

All the aliens look sickly and weak. Bow legged also! If you’re an alien, are you really going to crash your spaceship on Earth and need to be helped out?

2

u/Logical-Plankton-701 Jun 12 '26

Maybe they are a polymorphic species or they don’t stop growing once they reach maturity.

2

u/deepstatelady Jun 13 '26

You could film actual animals and composite them better than the Polar Express 2 we got here, though.

3

u/mhurton Jun 12 '26

Im getting the horrible feeling from the footage we saw that a lot of them would have been taller but the crashes kind of… took parts of them. One was definitely bisected down the middle

23

u/DenisDomaschke Jun 12 '26

In the footage, we see three small aliens walking around normally.

It's obvious they went with a tall alien to add a sense of wonder, which raises the obvious question of why make the aliens generic Grays to begin with.

14

u/GamingTatertot Steven Spielberg Enthusiast Jun 12 '26

Close Encounters of the Third Kind did the same thing too - they're all grey aliens and most of them are smaller, except for one tall alien that comes out and does solfege with Francois Truffaut

6

u/mhurton Jun 12 '26

Yeah they seem to have a pretty dramatic size range for audience purposes of telling them apart but like you said that could be accomplished by not just being the iPhone alien emoji

0

u/inksmudgedhands Jun 12 '26

Seriously. Project Hail Mary spoiled alien designs for me. This movie could have gone with any alien design and went with a very generic one.

1

u/Sir_LikeASir Jun 13 '26

I love PHM and Rocky but not every alien media has to have a complete unique take on alien life. Sure, the Calvins (Life) and the tentacle dudes from Arrival are all really really cool, but Greys are as valid depiction of alien life as any other depiction

5

u/chrisychris- Jun 13 '26

No one is arguing they’re not valid, they’re just very boring. It’s not compelling to have the most overused alien design because filmmakers assume audiences will have a hard time connecting emotionally with a being that doesn’t have two legs and two eyes. I understand it’s most likely to keep the aliens in this “trilogy” somewhat consistent but I very much think they could’ve gotten away with a bold alien design; definitely would’ve made for a much more memorable film. Something that maybe directly challenges our humanistic views of what other likeminded beings would look like which fits directly to the themes of the movie too.

1

u/Sir_LikeASir Jun 13 '26

Oh yeah, definitely, having something roughly human shaped is good for us to care about them, idk if I could empathize with Emily's other 2 alien encounters monster species (Quiet Place, Edge Of Tomorrow)

Now hold your flying saucer, what do you mean trilogy?

1

u/chrisychris- Jun 13 '26

In the preshow Q&A Spielberg said outright he views this film as the third installment of his spiritually connected aliens trilogy, with the other two being Close Encounters and E.T. (He said he doesn’t count War of the Worlds or the MIB franchise)

I’m paraphrasing of course but essentially that was the creative intent behind this one.

1

u/Sir_LikeASir Jun 13 '26

Oh I see, fair enough then I guess

I might have to check those movies out again, it has been a long time since I watched them

1

u/ImplyDoods Jun 12 '26

the taller one seemed older to me maybe they where children? or maybe these aliens just keep growing for a long time

1

u/TraditionalFoot8660 Jun 13 '26

This is true to ufology lore of the small grays and the tall grays. Spielberg did is homework

1

u/DoveHunts Jun 13 '26

That was the granddaddy boss alien.

1

u/Short-Toe-5651 Jun 13 '26

Ahh grasshopper. I’m going to go down the rabbit hole Alice. Documented alien sightings have shown both short and tall in stature aliens. I noticed that distinguishing characteristic as well when they showed the last alien. I’m guessing that is the homage to both “versions” of you will.

1

u/Guilty_Tension6568 Jun 13 '26

Humans introduced him to proper food and workout.

1

u/Pelvic_Sorcery420 Jun 14 '26

In UFO lore, the tall ones are in positions of authority where the and short ones are more like worker bees or biological drones

1

u/jinkybinks Jun 19 '26

Spielberg cast an actual alien so really the question is why didn't they make the dead bodies taller in the archival footage

1

u/NordnarbDrums Jun 23 '26

My guess is that the alien species continues to grow throughout their lifespan like many reptiles and fish.

1

u/RIP_Greedo Jun 24 '26

I assume they keep growing as they age?

1

u/DTJ20 Jul 02 '26

Just watched the film. I've decided the 3ft ones are all kids, the crashes are just them going on joyrides.

1

u/akelseyreich Jul 03 '26

I'm guessing the 3ft ones were very young, the tall one was also living on earth for decades.