Everything That Makes Zero Sense in Steven Spielberg’s DISCLOSURE DAY

When I first watched Disclosure Day, I walked away feeling entertained but somewhat underwhelmed. After sitting with it for a few days and revisiting the film, a different issue started creeping into my mind. The more I thought about the story, the more I found myself questioning the logic holding it all together.

Now, before anyone grabs a pitchfork, this isn't about nitpicking every little detail in a science fiction movie. Spielberg has spent decades making audiences believe impossible things. That's part of the magic.

The problem with Disclosure Day is that it repeatedly asks viewers to accept decisions and plot developments that don't just stretch credibility, they completely snap it in half.

It also raises an interesting question. Are members of the film industry and fans treating Disclosure Day a little more gently than it would another movie because it comes from Steven Spielberg?

That's not meant as an attack on Spielberg, who remains one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. I am a massive fan of Spielberg! It's simply hard to imagine some of these storytelling choices receiving the same level of forgiveness if they came from a lesser-known director.

The first major issue arrives almost immediately with Wardex, the secretive government-backed organization tasked with hiding the existence of alien life. This is supposedly an all-powerful operation that has spent decades covering up extraterrestrial contact and reverse engineering alien technology.

These people have satellites, surveillance capabilities, unlimited resources, and access to technology beyond anything the public knows exists.

Yet somehow Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) manages to walk away with humanity's biggest secret. The movie wants us to believe Wardex is both incredibly powerful and shockingly incompetent at the same time.

One of the clearest examples is the alien device Daniel steals. Throughout the film, everyone treats this object like it could change everything. Yet we're never shown that it's actually capable of being used as a weapon.

If Wardex is willing to kill to protect its secrets, why not simply eliminate Daniel immediately? Why allow him to spend the entire movie running around the country carrying evidence that could expose everything?

The answer often feels less like character logic and more like plot necessity. That issue extends throughout nearly every chase sequence in the movie. Wardex is presented as an organization with limitless reach, but they appear to have forgotten drones exist.

Seriously. Daniel is repeatedly located in places where modern surveillance would make escape virtually impossible. He's hiding in a farmhouse. He's driving across open terrain. He's sitting in a motel. At multiple points, the audience is expected to believe this organization can psychically invade people's minds but can't put a drone in the sky to take this guy out.

In the real world, Daniel's story probably ends in the first act. The inconsistency becomes even more frustrating because the film establishes that Wardex can use its mysterious Device to influence and manipulate people remotely.

They attempt this strategy with Jane early on, but then largely stop using it whenever the story needs her to remain free. It's one of several examples where abilities seem to disappear the moment they become inconvenient to the plot.

Then there's the motel sequence, which may be one of the most baffling examples of forced storytelling in the entire movie.

Daniel carefully removes anything that could reveal their location and takes extensive precautions to avoid being tracked. Yet somehow he falls asleep while holding a piece of paper containing the address they've worked so hard to conceal. He also leaves Jane without taking the obvious precaution of ensuring she can't identify their location.

The entire sequence only works because multiple characters suddenly stop behaving like rational human beings. The same thing happens at the farmhouse. Daniel leaves Jane alone because the movie apparently needs him to wander into a field so audiences can see a crop circle.

The crop circle looks cool in the trailer, but it ultimately has little relevance to the story itself. It's one of several moments where the movie seems more interested in creating iconic imagery than maintaining narrative consistency.

Wardex's inability to function as a competent organization continues throughout the film. At one point Daniel and Margaret literally walk through the facility while employees become distracted by Marget appearing to them as loved ones.

Everyone sees Daniel as Daniel. Nobody tackles them. Nobody shoots them. Nobody physically restrains them. Everyone simply watches them leave, and once they do leave they decide they have to go chase after them again! They were right there!

For a group that has supposedly protected humanity's greatest secret since Roswell, they're remarkably bad at stopping two people from walking out the door.

The train sequence that follows might be the most unintentionally funny scene in the entire movie. Casper Boyd spends the film relentlessly pursuing Daniel and Margaret. During the scene he has an incredibly clear opportunity to kill them as he shoots at them, but somehow a guy, who you know has had high level firearms training fails.

This also comes after after he trys to push their car into the oncoming train, which seems incredibly wreckless. There stuck at a train stop, there’s an easier way to kill them. But, you know, why didn’t he just kill them when he was standing right next to them in the previous scene!

Later, Wardex doesn't even manage to track where the train is going despite possessing resources that should make this task laughably easy.

Even stranger is Boyd's eventual character turn. After spending nearly the entire film chasing these people, trying to stop disclosure at all costs, he suddenly decides he's had enough and essentially steps aside. The emotional motivation is tied to memories of his deceased wife, but the shift feels abrupt compared to everything we've seen from him previously.

Then there's the alien reveal itself. One criticism directed at some viewers is that they expected more aliens from a movie about alien disclosure. That's a fair expectation considering the marketing heavily featured UFO imagery and promoted the mystery surrounding extraterrestrial life.

The problem is that the film treats its final reveal like a major emotional payoff even though the audience already knows aliens exist.

The movie is called Disclosure Day. The trailers focus on disclosure. The entire plot revolves around disclosure. There's no mystery left to reveal. The film spends so much time building toward a moment audiences have already accepted from the very beginning.

The aliens themselves raise another collection of questions. According to the story, they've spent years disguising themselves as animals, abducting children, conducting experiments, and granting abilities to select individuals as part of an elaborate plan to eventually reveal their existence.

Why? Why choose this absurdly complicated path? Why not simply make contact? Why involve children? Why create decades of secrecy only to eventually announce themselves anyway? The film never provides answers that feel satisfying.

It also accidentally makes the aliens seem far more unsettling than inspirational. If an advanced species has been secretly abducting children and manipulating human lives for decades, that's not exactly the comforting message the film seems to think it is.

The movie's broader themes don't entirely hold up under scrutiny either. A major component of the story suggests that revealing alien life would fundamentally transform humanity and unite the world. The film treats disclosure as a cure for division, conflict, and even the looming threat of global war.

That's a nice idea. It's also incredibly difficult to believe. The movie presents a world on the brink of catastrophe, with fears of nuclear conflict escalating rapidly. Yet audiences are asked to accept that a single televised revelation would instantly inspire empathy, end hostilities, and bring humanity together.

Human beings struggle to agree on basic facts in the real world. The idea that everyone would suddenly unite after watching footage of extraterrestrials feels less like thoughtful speculation and more like wishful thinking.

Even some of the smaller moments feel oddly disconnected from the rest of the story. Margaret's panic attack aboard the train culminates in a piano sequence that seems designed to carry deep emotional significance. The problem is that the film never establishes any meaningful connection between Margaret and a piano beforehand. The scene feels like it belongs to a different movie.

Another confusing moment occurs when someone blesses themselves in front of Margaret, prompting her to respond, "I don't wanna be anyone's religion." It's an interesting line, but the movie never really explores it. The idea appears briefly and then disappears.

That becomes a recurring problem throughout Disclosure Day. The film introduces fascinating concepts involving religion, spirituality, truth, faith, and humanity's place in the universe, but many of those ideas receive only surface-level exploration before the story rushes toward its next set piece.

Even visually, the film doesn't always help itself. Spielberg's camera movement remains impressive, and his technical skill is undeniable, but many of the locations feel oddly generic. Despite supposedly taking place in Kansas City, the setting rarely develops a distinct personality. The environments blend together, creating a backdrop that often feels interchangeable.

And then there are certain action scenes and how they are utilized. Daniel crashing a vehicle through multiple obstacles, like a house, while dozens of agents fail to stop him feels less like a tense thriller and more like a live-action cartoon.

Another sequence involving a car driving off a cliff somehow allows characters to escape detection despite being surrounded by incompetant agents, who fail to search the area. The two characters are like five feet away from them hiding behond a rock!

By that point, the movie has largely abandoned realism altogether. None of this means Disclosure Day is completely without merit. The film contains compelling themes, strong performances, and moments of genuine entertainment. Emily Blunt remains fantastic throughout, and Spielberg's ambition deserves credit even when the execution doesn't always work.

But the more time you spend thinking about the movie, the more its storytelling starts to unravel. The questions pile up faster than the answers. Character decisions become harder to justify. Entire plotlines begin to feel constructed around convenient outcomes rather than logical progression.

Maybe that's why Disclosure Day has become such a divisive movie among science fiction fans. Some viewers connect with its themes and emotional aspirations. Others can't get past the fact that the story often seems to operate on dream logic.

Either way, it's hard to deny one thing. For a movie centered on revealing the truth, Disclosure Day leaves audiences with an awful lot of unanswered questions.