Editor’s note: This review contains spoilers.
(LifeSiteNews) — I sat through an early showing of Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day having braced myself to witness my Catholic faith being insidiously undermined if not outright attacked. What I should’ve prepared myself for was two-and-a-half hours of uninspired filmmaking.
And it wasn’t just me. I spoke with others as they exited the theater. These were die-hard fans who had rushed to see the first possible showing of Disclosure Day, expecting to be wowed by Spielberg’s latest offering. The general consensus? “Meh.”
In recent weeks, Spielberg has warned that his movie would “shake the faith” of Christians because it tells a tale of eight decades of the U.S. government hiding evidence of alien visits. In an interview on CBS Sunday Morning, Spielberg explained:
If this truth were just known overnight, if the government announced, ‘Yes, we have been keeping this from you since 1947,’ that would mess up a lot of people. And the movie also takes the position of the church. What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have? And is God, our God only on this planet, or is God a God for every system where there’s civilization, intelligent life, and even developing life?
Fresh from a special screening of ‘Disclosure Day’ before its release tomorrow, LifeSite’s Doug Mainwaring gives his initial thoughts on Steven Spielberg’s latest movie.
See a full review tomorrow at https://t.co/DviylIis4f pic.twitter.com/4ZW5mh6B5k
— LifeSiteNews (@LifeSite) June 11, 2026
But if Spielberg had a demonic goal of creating an existential threat for Christendom — a nuclear bomb-level identity crisis for Christians — he has failed. Having seen the movie, it seems to me he was trying to create a “buzz” before Disclosure Day’s national release in order to drive ticket sales.
That being said, Spielberg clearly used the Catholic faith as a surrogate for all of Christianity. The movie relies on constant visual references to Catholicism: a crucifix, St. Clare, a convent full of nuns in habits, nuns in prayer in a chapel, and a woman making the sign of the cross as she kneels all play important roles in the film. Additionally, one of the main characters is a young former postulant.
Throughout the movie, the question arises: If the world were to suddenly discover that extraterrestrial aliens exist, have visited us, and even lived among us, would that destroy religious faith?
It goes further and asks: What if aliens were shown to be more empathetic than either man or God, and more capable than God of bringing about peace on earth?
In fact, as implied at the end of the movie, as news being broadcast from a small local TV station in Missouri spreads to all major networks in the U.S. and around the world, disclosure of the “truth” about the existence of these aliens quickly averts World War III.
READ: Matt Walsh, EWTN, Catholic Answers all fall for the alien deception
That news literally preempts World War III.
“The world has just changed profoundly,” announces one TV news anchor as one grainy black and white bit of formerly classified video evidence is shown.
“If you are seeing this, you are not alone,” she says, as if she has suddenly found the one true faith.
A minute later, in a scene that recalls the fond goodbyes of E.T. to Elliot and his siblings at the end of E.T., a grandfatherly alien is brought into the newsroom in a wheelchair and embraces the movie’s two adult protagonists he had abducted when they were youngsters.
I wholeheartedly agree with National Review’s Armond White: “Disclosure Day is the trashiest Spielberg film since the Halloween prank Poltergeist (credited to Tobe Hooper but bearing Spielberg’s fingerprints).”
I can’t see anybody’s faith being threatened by this level of dreck. If anything, Spielberg was trying to recapture the warm and fuzzy vibes of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Like both those blockbuster movies, Disclosure Day’s soundtrack was scored by composer John Williams and, like Close Encounters, incorporated a Disney song — “Someday My Prince Will Come” — in the hope of awakening nostalgia for one’s childhood, something that Spielberg and his creative team have always excelled at.
Spielberg has lost his once-magic touch in the realm of science fiction, as was proven twenty years ago with his awful remake of 1952’s The War of the Worlds, with its slightly shorter title War of the Worlds. In the case of both films, there are just too many instances where the viewer is asked to overlook holes and incongruities in the script.
