Disclosure Day: The Only Thing It Discloses Is Spielberg’s Decline

You already know the drill. A major studio prestige picture rolls out, and somewhere in the runtime a priest will say something monstrous, a believer will be portrayed as either a fool or a fanatic, and the Church will exist mainly as scenery for someone else’s crisis of faith. We’ve seen this movie. We’ve seen it so many times we could write the scenes ourselves — and probably write them better. So when Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day trots out its laughably facile anti-Christian tropes, I’m not going to waste your time cataloguing them one by one. You know the playbook. We’re used to the playbook.

What we are not used to, what none of us were prepared for, is everything else.

Disclosure Day is not a bad movie because it’s hostile to Christianity. Plenty of bad movies manage that much and still hold together as movies. Disclosure Day is a bad movie because it does not appear to know what a movie is. There are no character arcs in it, because — and I want to be precise here — there don’t appear to be characters. There are actors, moved from location to location, given lines to read, but possessed of no discernible motivation, no will of their, just some unknowable motivation external to them. They are puppets in the truest sense. The plot — if “plot” is even the word for whatever connective tissue holds these scenes together — runs entirely on McGuffins that do whatever the next scene requires of them, with all the internal logic of a fever dream. And I guffawed at the absurd idea, the idea so boomer, in 2026 to release this info to the masses you would go to an NBC affiliate!! I am not making it up.

It’s an embarrassment. Not a controversial movie. Not a daring movie. An embarrassment.

And here’s the part that should really sting, because Disclosure Day actually wants credit for being daring. It postures as though it’s grappling with the Big Questions about what alien life would mean particularly for Christian faithful, but it fails completely. Its glib few throw away lines just reveal that he doesn’t actually know what we believe.

How does a director get this far into a career — Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, a body of work that shaped how an entire generation understands cinema — and arrive here? At a film with no characters, no plot, and a thesis about faith that couldn’t survive five minutes of contact with an actual believer?

We’re used to the tropes. As I said, the anti-Christian nonsense is old news — we’ve built up the calluses for that. What’s new, and what’s actually shocking, is watching one of our great directors forget how to make a movie.

The only belief Disclosure Day manages to shake is our belief that Spielberg still has it.