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The following article contains major spoilers for Disclosure Day<\/em>, including its ending.<\/strong><\/p>\n Watching a lot of Steven Spielberg<\/a>‘s movies is like bathing in a gigantic bucket of sentimental, dewey-eyed optimism, and Disclosure Day<\/em> is no different. And I actually mean that as a compliment. As you might’ve read, we live in increasingly depressing times, and it is entirely welcome to leave a cinema feeling less despondent about the state of the world \u2014 and, well, humankind \u2014 than when you walked in.<\/p>\n Which is kind of an odd way to feel about a story in which the American government is colluding with a shady corporation to hide the existence of aliens from the public. Oh, and all the while, the planet is on the brink of World War III and nuclear destruction<\/a> \u2013 thanks to renewed conflict between North Korea and the United States \u2013 and people are either frozen in terror or flocking to supermarkets to stock up on toilet roll in their droves. And yet, somehow, Disclosure Day<\/em> manages to be one of the most hopeful films in years; an anathema to the prevailing notion that everything is going to shit, and all we can do is strap in for the ride. Not least when the film’s ending hits.<\/p>\n First, a brief recap. Josh O’Connor<\/a> plays mousy-haired whistleblower Daniel Kellner, who has stolen classified evidence of alien visitations to earth \u2014 going all the way back to the infamous Roswell incident in the late \u201840s \u2014 from his employer, the Wardex Corporation, who have long conducted secret research on crashed UFOs on behalf of the White House. In the meantime, what can only be described as \u201cweird shit\u201d starts happening to Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a weather presenter in Kansas City: one morning, she suddenly finds herself fluent in every language known to man, and that she suddenly knows everything about anyone just by looking at them, much to the bafflement of her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell). They are both hunted down by Wardex, led by company chief Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth).<\/p>\n The prospect of Spielberg returning to the home territory subject matter of his early career might\u2019ve had everyone thinking Disclosure Day<\/em> would be a Close Encounters<\/em> regen, but the bulk of the movie plays out more like one of his fingertip-chewing thrillers, a la Munich<\/em> or Bridge of Spies<\/em>. There are killer action scenes and car chases; woven into it all by screenwriter David Koepp<\/a> are lofty thematic questions about whether humankind is ready to know about the existence of aliens, and the existential implications that might pose for, say, world religions. (If God made us in his image, why do the aliens have big grey heads and massive ovular eyes? Checkmate, Christians. Please don’t do a mass suicide.) Turns out that the aliens abducted Kellner and Fairchild when they were young, giving them both nigh-on magical powers.<\/p>\n This all leads to a climax in which, with the globe on the brink of destruction, Kellner and Fairchild \u2014 aided by Wardex defector Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo<\/a>) and his fringe group of disclosure advocates \u2014 take over the latter’s news station. They broadcast the archived alien footage, revealing the existence of extraterrestrials to the world. This proves enough to take everyone’s eyes off impending geopolitical Armageddon. Only minutes earlier being a red button away from blowing each other to smithereens, the world is reunited in recognising a status-quo-shattering truth: We are not alone. With that, humanity seems so small \u2014 and so do our petty, nukemaxxing disputes. Oh, and then Wakefield wheels an actual alien into the news room, who weakly whispers something in his click-clack space language to Fairchild. She returns to the camera to relay his message: \u201cListen,\u201d she begins. And then the screen cuts to black.<\/p>\n Yeah<\/em>. In some ways, it’s more Nolan than Spielberg: a big \u2018ol \u201cwhat the fuck\u201d final swing that relishes in its ambiguity, dodges easy answers, and most importantly, leaves you feeling like your brain is leaking out of your ears. Is Spielberg, famed IRL believer, suggesting that the only way humankind can avoid its inevitable self-inflicted heat death is through alien intervention? That would certainly be quite the sombre read \u2014 and there are already plenty of movies out there for dour post-screening reflection over pints that taste like existential depression. (Hello, last year’s nuke thriller House of Dynamite<\/em><\/a>.) Instead, it’s worth taking in the biggest theme of Disclosure Day<\/em>, which is sentimental Spielberg at his most saccharine: for all of our current division, what we really want is to understand one another; to embrace our similarities, put the guns down, and recognise that some things are bigger than all of us.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n