The Secrets of Disclosure Day

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SCR195: A Kansas City TV meteorologist suddenly speaks a language no human recognizes, a shadowy outfit called Wardex has spent decades burying proof of alien contact, and Steven Spielberg uses all of it to ask one very old question with a very new face: if we learned we were not alone, what would it do to our belief in God?

That question is what makes Disclosure Day worth talking about, and it’s where Dom Bettinelli, Jeff Haecker, and Tom Grelinger spend most of this episode of Secrets of Movies. Spielberg’s first alien film in twenty-one years is a loud, earnest, star-packed UFO thriller — and it’s surprisingly full of nuns, crucifixes, and theology. Margaret, played by Emily Blunt, becomes the reluctant face of disclosure, and her refusal to be treated as a religious figure — “I will not be worshipped” — sits at the heart of the movie’s argument.

The panel works through the faith material the film keeps reaching for: why Catholicism is the only religion on screen, what to make of a former novice whose theology has gone wobbly, and the movie’s invented line of Scripture about humanity being the supreme creation. They bring in Jimmy Akin’s familiar point that Catholic teaching has never ruled out non-human intelligence — angels already count — so the idea that aliens would automatically topple belief in God reads more like a category error than a real crisis.

Beyond the theology, this is still a Spielberg adventure, and the panel weighs the parts that work against the parts that don’t. Colman Domingo anchors the whistleblower side as Hugo, Josh O’Connor plays the cyber-expert who alone can understand Margaret, Wyatt Russell lands some of the biggest laughs as Jackson, and Eve Hewson rounds out the central group. Wardex, the private contractor standing in for Spielberg’s older government-and-military villains, comes off thin and sometimes goofy. And John Williams — scoring his thirtieth film with Spielberg at ninety-three — turns in something deliberately un-iconic, all strings and harp and a few unexpected synths, more scenery than signature.

Set against a backdrop of looming nuclear war and a more cynical, of-its-time mood, Disclosure Day lands as a solid mid-tier Spielberg — not Close Encounters, not E.T., but a genuine adventure built around a question worth sitting with. Tom, the panel’s resident Kansas City expert, also fact-checks the skyline, the fictional towns, and those very real fire-department trucks.

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