The Disclosure Day praises traditional TV news

I didn’t walk into this movie with the same wide-eyed wonder I had as an 8-year-old watching E.T.. This time I bought the ticket purely for Emily Blunt’s acting. Her character’s special ability isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but she sells it so convincingly (she’s actually 43 playing 36 — and it works).

A 79-year-old master like Spielberg has a different lens. The heroine’s father gets Parkinson’s at 47, and the fear of hereditary disease hits hard. That terror becomes a real test of faith, and Blunt’s performance in the train car with the piano is award-worthy.

Casting director Cindy Tolan scored a masterstroke landing Colin Firth (65) as the villain. He’s one of the big reasons the film holds up.

Elizabeth Marvel as Sister Maura is basically the voice of the Creator herself. That steely gaze and delivery perfectly echoes Blunt’s character (even though they never share a scene). I’m guessing they didn’t cast her just because her last name is Marvel… but damn, it’s marvelous!

I was a bit disappointed with Josh O’Connor’s scientist, though. He spends the whole movie in full panic mode — everything’s doomed, everything’s terrible. The final twist where he’s supposed to show hope just didn’t land. On the bright side, Eve Hewson as the girlfriend was solid. She’s got real star potential.

Spielberg and John Williams are one of the greatest director-composer duos in film history — over 50 years and 30+ films together, starting with *The Sugarland Express* in 1974. This score isn’t big and bombastic; it’s more gentle and lingering. Whether it’ll prove truly lasting, only time will tell.

The movie’s biggest love letter is to the power and credibility of traditional television news. Spielberg briefly nods to social media at the start but then completely ignores it — a clear sign of where the old master stands. In this era of livestreams, fragmented attention, and entertainment overload, the older generation is still clinging to that last reliable life raft: trustworthy TV news.

Spielberg’s core idea is that only children are worthy of genuine alien contact, because pure hearts (mostly) lack malice and greed. By contrast, the adult world — including the U.S. government’s alleged “torture” of alien prisoners — is terrifying. That’s why the aliens appear in animal form when connecting with good humans. The most symbolic? The Northern Cardinal. Its scientific name, Cardinalis, comes from the Catholic “cardinal” (red-robed bishop). In American folklore, cardinals are spiritual messengers and angels in disguise. The saying goes: “When cardinals appear, angels are near.” A sign of good fortune.

America really has always been the prime landing spot for aliens in the popular imagination, and Hollywood has done more than its part to fuel that myth. But with the rise of streaming and local film cultures around the world, this new Spielberg film (his last?) feels like the ending itself — open-ended, Listen!” And the next chapter might not even come from Hollywood.