Steven Spielberg’s DISCLOSURE DAY Brings Its Alien Mystery to Peacock in October

If you skipped Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Dayin theaters, good, you saved your money. The sci-fi film is headed to Peacock on October 9, giving curious viewers a chance to check it out at home and those who already saw it an opportunity to revisit some of its stranger choices.

Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor lead the film as two strangers whose lives are connected by something much bigger than either of them realizes.

Blunt plays a Kansas City weather reporter hoping to make the jump to a more serious news anchor position. Those career plans hit a major problem when she suddenly begins speaking an unearthly language during a live broadcast.

O’Connor plays a former employee of a secretive government contractor who has taken off with highly classified material. Their stories eventually collide as Disclosure Day digs into its alien mystery and the secrets surrounding it.

The supporting cast includes Colman Domingo as one of the good guys, Colin Firth as the villain, Eve Hewson as a supportive girlfriend, and Wyatt Russell as a considerably less supportive boyfriend.

Spielberg has obviously explored extraterrestrial life several times throughout his career, but Disclosure Day doesn’t come close to the eerie fascination of Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the heart and wonder of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

It leans more toward the emotional side of those movies than the large-scale destruction of his War of the Worlds, but the execution left me seriously disappointed.

I’m a huge Spielberg fan, and I was super excited to see Disclosure Day, and I think it ended up being one of the most mediocre movies he’s ever made.

There are some interesting ideas here, and you can see the pieces of a much better sci-fi movie buried inside it, but too much of the story simply doesn’t work.

The way certain events unfold, the decisions characters make, and some of the movie’s internal logic kept pulling me out of it. This could’ve been so much better, especially considering the filmmaker responsible for it.

Blunt is easily the best thing about the movie. She commits completely to the material and gives Disclosure Day some much-needed energy even when the story around her isn’t holding together.

Streaming might actually be the ideal way to watch Disclosure Day, especially since you can pause whenever the story starts raising questions it doesn’t have great answers for.

You can wonder how Wardex has spent decades hiding alien life while repeatedly failing to stop one guy carrying its biggest secret away, why an organization with incredible surveillance technology apparently forgets drones exist, or why its most useful abilities seem to disappear whenever they would bring the story to an early end. The more you think about some of these choices, the harder the movie is to buy.

Maybe Disclosure Day will work better for you than it did for me. Spielberg has made some of my favorite movies, so I certainly didn’t go into this hoping to dislike it. Unfortunately, it was a major letdown.

If you’ve been waiting to make up your own mind, Disclosure Day begins streaming on Peacock October 9.