The Ending of Disclosure Day Has a Message for Humanity

The title of Disclosure Day tells you everything you need to know. In Steven Spielberg’s latest sci-fi blockbuster, there’s never any question of whether extraterrestrial life exists (it does) or whether we’ve made contact with it (we have). Instead, Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp wonder: What would happen if humanity was presented with irrefutable proof of alien life? Would it exacerbate existing global conflicts, or make them seem petty and pointless? Would we turn from religion en masse, and start worshipping the aliens instead?

The film’s finale brings us back to the newsroom at the (fictional) Kansas City TV station KCXE, where the truth — never doubted, but only briefly seen up to that point — is revealed to humanity en masse thanks to a local server and a global network of live 24-hour TV channels. And while the story ends without definitively answering its big existential questions, it does point in a direction that’s very Spielbergian.

Margaret and Daniel’s Connection

Although it’s weatherperson Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) who makes this world-changing announcement, disclosure would not have been possible without Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), the whistleblower who stole both the hard drives full of video that corroborate Margaret’s statement and a piece of extraterrestrial technology from the sinister Wardex Corporation. The two are drawn together by a psychic bond that seems inexplicable at first, but is later explained as the result of a shared “traumatic event” that happened when they were both children.

With the help of that alien tech — and an exact replica of Margaret’s childhood home, which even Daniel’s co-conspirator Hugo (Colman Domingo) admits is “a bit much” — the nature of that event is also revealed towards the end of the film. As it turns out, Margaret and Daniel were both abducted by the same group of benevolent grey aliens, who implanted a latent talent in each of their brains that would help them carry out the visitors’ grand plan as adults.

Margaret is given extraordinary empathic abilities, which are so powerful that they seem like she’s able to read people’s minds. (She was totally unaware of these powers until she was “activated” by the appearance of that strange red bird at the beginning of the movie.) This is the ultimate purpose of the extraterrestrials’ grand Disclosure Day plan: Empathy is one of the building blocks of the universe, and humanity’s abandonment of this quality is rapidly leading us to our destruction. Using her connection to other people, Margaret is the savior who will lead us to rediscover our humanity.

By comparison, Daniel is simply a translator. His abilities are important: He’s been given an innate understanding of mathematics, “the language in which the book of the universe was written.” This allows him to understand the aliens’ language, which is based on mathematical patterns. He’s the conduit for transmitting their message to the world, and both he and Margaret are necessary for saving the world from itself.

A Hopeful Conclusion

Margaret is about to convey the head alien’s message to all of humanity — which is now watching en masse, pausing the buildup to WWIII in the wake of this shocking revelation — when Disclosure Day cuts to black. At first, this is frustrating: Just when all the film’s answers are about to be answered, it’s over. But the ending serves a thematic purpose, one that’s quite optimistic about human nature and our ability to turn things around.

A sense of wonder is key to Spielberg’s style as a filmmaker, and in a recent trailer for the film the director says that, in the nearly 50 years since he first explored the question of extraterrestrial life in Close Encounters of the First Kind, he’s “much more inclined...to believe that we’re not the only intelligent civilization in the universe.” These tendencies combine in Disclosure Day, in which the filmmaker affirms his faith in humanity by creating a scenario where the revelation that we’re not alone is met not by division or panic, but by a universally shared feeling of astonishment and awe.

In a “post-truth” age where generative AI is eroding our collective ability to trust that what we see is real, it’s a truly hopeful scenario, with a message of unity that urges us to look past what divides us to connect over what we share.

“Listen,” Margaret says. Spielberg is certain that we will.

From Universal Pictures, Disclosure Day is in theaters now.