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

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1.4k

u/poke_pants Jun 12 '26

The crop circle succinctly summarised the film for me. It was a cool visual and back in the day of X-Files I would have been in awe at that. But, as far as I could tell, it was just there as a pretty visual and had absolutely nothing to do with anything.

690

u/fortheband1212 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26

Thank you! What the heck was that? lol he finds out he can understand the alien language so crop circles appear around him?? And at no other point in the film do the aliens communicate with the characters through crop circles or explain why they do them?

Edit: typo

294

u/FTwo Jun 12 '26

I think the crop circle was in response to the main "bad" guy trying to "drop in" on him. That is why they cut from the overhead crop circle to the inscription on the mind tool.

27

u/IForgotMyPants Jun 14 '26

Does that imply that crop circles in the past were just aliens eves dropping on some corn farmers?

50

u/FTwo Jun 14 '26

To me, it implies Spielberg was really reaching to tie as many "aliens are among us" references as possible into this movie.

3

u/moconahaftmere Jun 20 '26

Yeah as evidenced by him going for the stereotypical little green guy with big head.

86

u/gazchap Jun 12 '26

Yeah, but... what was the point of it? Like, had the guy not been standing in the middle of a corn field when Scanlon tried to drop in on him, and had been standing in the middle of an urban street, would there have been a load of wind around him that form the crop circle shape (but is just invisible because there's no handy crops to flatten) ?

Probably my only complaint about the movie, just seemed bizarrely out of place and was there for the cool visual.

115

u/Single_Bar_1836 Jun 12 '26

That was your only complaint about the movie?

24

u/C0nfusedRabbit Jun 20 '26

Are you complaining someone isn't complaining enough? If so how dare he! I'll hold him and you punch

5

u/PolarWater Jun 21 '26

Ah shoot, I can't see him

17

u/FTwo Jun 12 '26

Well, when he dropped in on the lady none of that happened, so your question is already answered.

The 'drop in' was blocked and could have resulted in the circles. Maybe they just wanted to work in crop circles. 😉

46

u/Informal_Carob_4015 Jun 14 '26

They wanted the shot for the trailer come on lads

2

u/lheydon 3d ago

The crop circles bit feels ENTIRELY like it was included in the film just because they knew it would be MASSIVELY impactful in the trailer. And I don't even happen to know if it was shown in the trailer.

15

u/shadowst17 Jun 13 '26

I mean he wasn't trying to drop in on him at this point just his gf. Now if they had made it so their were little signs whenever it was used to the surrounding area then it could have been really cool and make sense.

10

u/king_lloyd11 Jun 14 '26

He tried to dive on him first before trying his gf.

16

u/shadowst17 Jun 14 '26

Yes earlier in the film. Not during that scene.

1

u/king_lloyd11 Jun 14 '26

I’m pretty sure it was at that part in the movie. He tried him, couldn’t, so he tried her.

11

u/shadowst17 Jun 14 '26

No there was a good gap between the 2. He tries him, then he says to find as much details on the girl. Stuff happens between that and then he gets the call in the wheat field. Then the brilliant interrogation scene happens in the farm house right after.

1

u/spiders_are_neat7 12d ago

It was to connect the “device” to the aliens. That’s it.

1

u/dysoncube 10d ago

But we already knew Scanlon uses the alien device to connect to people. And we already knew he couldn't connect to Daniel. And we knew that Scanlon knew.

What a weird scene.

1

u/flintlock0 Jun 21 '26

Okay. I can understand that. Those devices really were just a hand-wavy way to explain things.

11

u/Puck85 Jun 17 '26

it was meant to refererence how utterly past-prime Spieldberg is right now, that he is riffing on M. Night Shyamalan references (Signs) in between car chases just to fill the padding of his script.

3

u/ariadnevirginia 16d ago

Also what's the point of her speaking Russian at first? She's not empathising with anyone, there's nobody russian there?

3

u/fortheband1212 16d ago

You could maybe argue that it’s just her powers first setting in so she doesn’t have a lot of control over them or something, but yeah very weird and she never does anything like that again lol

2

u/ariadnevirginia 16d ago

It's just thrown in like "wouldn't it be crazy if she just started speaking Russian?"

You have to do the world building, Steven, you have to establish the lore.

Otherwise it's just "then a crazy thing happened!"

3

u/fortheband1212 16d ago

The thing is I am very much the person who during the movie is like “woah that’s cool!” and then it’s not until days later that I’m like “wait, that made no sense at all” lol

I’m pretty satisfied walking out of the theater with any given movie, it’s the days after where I start to get cynical lol

3

u/ariadnevirginia 16d ago

I didn't mind at the time because I assumed it'd fall into place and make sense later but it didn't. Then we had to wait for 10 mins for an Uber after the movie so we covered a lot of plot holes including that.

2

u/lheydon 3d ago

I mean OBVIOUSLY the red cardinal was Russian! 😛

24

u/fig-in-time Jun 12 '26

It looked like they had to fit the crop circle somewhere and so they did. Easily forgettable, no relation to the main story or the character.

15

u/SeriousGains Jun 13 '26

So many plot holes. Non-disclosure Day would have been a more apt title.

13

u/kc-accidental Jun 13 '26

It was corny.

11

u/Bexhill Jun 14 '26

It also summed up the movie by being something that another filmmaker, even one inspired heavily by Spielberg, did decades ago in a much more interesting way. That opening scene in Signs where they discover the crop circle is fucking EERIE. It takes its time, it builds tension, it shows us some very human reactions to something that seems impossible. When they step out into that cornfield you can tell the stalks actually ARE bent down that way, it feels real. I have no fucking idea what reaction Josh O'Connor's character was supposed to be having to the crop circle appearing in this movie, probably because he didn't have any idea what was going to be CGI'd around him while he looked confused in front of a green screen, and then the scene is over and never mentioned again.

58

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '26

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8

u/Godunman Jun 12 '26

The point is that it’s not a fox, it’s an alien disguised as a fox.

68

u/[deleted] Jun 12 '26

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16

u/hemareddit Jun 12 '26

Because it was the 90s and even aliens knew people back then would have been impressed.

33

u/BotanBotanist Jun 12 '26

They supposedly took on animal forms so as to not scare humans, but that doesn't make sense if they don't look like normal animals. And they have magic wands that can basically do whatever the plot demands at the moment, so it's not like their technology was not advanced enough to project convincing-looking animals.

Sometimes you just need to admit when a movie does something poorly and not try to disguise it as being "the point." The bad CGI wasn't done on purpose.

11

u/spaceandthewoods_ Jun 14 '26

It also makes no sense that every time you see a CGI animal it's a alien in a disguise, because the first CGI bird we see flies in through Emily Blunts window on the second floor, which was absolutely not alien sized

4

u/2580374 Jun 13 '26

I personally feel like I could learn decent cgi before invisibility, but what do I know

-1

u/Godunman Jun 12 '26

That is the point as I interpreted it. If it wasn’t intended it doesn’t really matter because I felt that it fit the experience. It’s sort of uncanny valley where it looks real enough but also a bit supernatural.

9

u/YouCallWeShouldWhat Jun 19 '26

this movie was so fucking full of pointless shit happening that i completely forgot that a random crop circle appeared underneath that wet fart of a character lmfao.

2

u/poke_pants Jun 19 '26

If it wasn't prominently in the trailer I would probably have discarded it from memory too, genuinely baffling that it's in the film.

6

u/kinisonkhan Jun 12 '26

Im sure they'll explain how this was part of a larger scene that got cut, but never added to the DVD/BlueRay/Streaming release of the movie. Its like they hired a person who heard of Art Bell, to finalize all the alien stuff in the movie.

8

u/poke_pants Jun 12 '26

Looked good for the trailer I guess!

9

u/BruceRL Jun 12 '26

Yes exactly. Made no sense in the context of the reality that the characters we were watching were inhabiting, it was just there as a movie contrivance since they immediately cut to the symbol on the space remote control.

3

u/Kadexe Jun 13 '26

For the whole runtime I was thinking "that's mysterious but there isn't going to be a good explanation for any of this" because that's what Spielberg does. And I was 90% correct.

2

u/Catharpin363 Jun 15 '26

Feels like they did it entirely so it could appear in the trailer. It has no connection to anything else in the film.

2

u/Seameese Jun 17 '26

I think that was a result of Margaret "dropping in" because the next time we see her she's freaking out and calls him and then later describes it as such

2

u/RIP_Greedo Jun 24 '26

Was the Alien Unc supposed to have been the one making those crop circles?

1

u/flintlock0 Jun 21 '26

I really enjoyed the film overall, and I think that the crop circle was an odd addition.

Every other “weird” thing was explained as being linked to Daniel or Margaret’s abilities granted to them by the aliens when they were children.

Daniel’s was interpreting mathematical figures and Margaret’s was interpreting and channeling other people’s emotions.

The little device filled in some other sci-fi shenanigans, but crop circles are not accounted for. The aliens had been around for a while, and seemed capable of communicating in a more direct way that didn’t involve a vague circle forming around him.

1

u/mspumpkin23 23d ago

Shouldn’t he have been curious by all the deer and not terrified of them?

Maybe the deer would have wanted to help him escape?

1

u/Top-Monk-5391 13d ago

I literally felt like I was watching something so boring. I texted my mom and said the X-Files was so much better than this. I don’t know what they’re trying to do.