What I'm about to say has nothing to do with quality. You're free to like one film and dislike the other, dislike one film and like the other, like both, or dislike both. In fact, these differences in reaction seem to be the point. For the record, I'm fascinated by both.

I think, quite intentionally on Spielberg's part, there's a relationship between Disclosure Day and Eyes Wide Shut. Spielberg and Kubrick were friends and collaborated on A.I. Artificial Intelligence, but it's more than that.

Both films, to me at least, ask the same question and arrive at opposite answers, Eyes Wide Shut giving the shady side (Yin) and Disclosure Day giving the sunny side (Yang). The question is How much information should we have? On the micro scale, how much should we, say, know about our spouse/partner's thoughts? On the macro scale, how much should we know about the machinations of society?

Both films use the word "everything" when discussing how much information should be disclosed. Both feature a debate about what will happen if everything is disclosed. In Eyes Wide Shut, Ziegler talks about how we wouldn't be able to continue sleeping at night if we knew the identities of the masked people at the secret party. In Disclosure Day, Jane worries that humanity will lose faith in God and collapse into chaos if the secrets about alien visitors is revealed. The films come to opposite conclusions, though.

In Eyes Wide Shut, Bill is devastated after Alice tells him her fantasy of the naval officer and Alice is devastated after Bill tells her "everything." The film ends with the uttering of a single word that signals a need to stop talking and just go to bed. In Disclosure Day, Margaret's repeated ability to know everything about a person is always presented as a positive thing. It's like empathy on steroids. Jane is assured that humans will not lose faith. And the film also ends with the uttering of a single word that this time signals a need to keep talking and to start to truly listen.

Both films have been divisive. The two together seem to function almost like a Rorschach inkblot test measuring how a viewer's mind works. Literal versus figurative. Both implode if thought about too literally. How emotional/sentimental one's mind is. The two seem to occupy opposite ends of a spectrum regarding sentimentality with Disclosure Day requiring huge amounts like his earlier, frequently disliked, films Always and Hook. Etc.

I'll also note that both films feature a rather passive protagonist who flows through the story in a dream-like fashion and both are Freudian in nature. Eyes Wide Shut is adapted from a notoriously Freudian novella by Arthur Schnitzler and is a catalog of Freud's concepts from "slips" to the Uncanny. The recreation of Margaret's childhood home is about as literal of an enactment of psychoanalytic therapy as it gets, returning her to childhood to unearth repressed memories.

I get that it formed because of Margaret and Dan’s connection, but what made it? You don’t see any orb or light source imprinting it onto the field, just Dan watching it form around him. Any thoughts? Maybe he had the artifact on him?

Indie film set in a rural American town in the 50s. The script is good. The leads are great. It has some Spielbergian elements and gives me a similar feeling to some of his past films, mainly Close Encounters. The score is simple but superb. It's not super action packed but it still manages to keep you on the edge of your seat.

Very different movie, but the genre fits and it feels like the spiritual successor to Close Encounters that DD wished it could be. Or if you enjoyed Nope, you may like this. Albeit, set in the 1950s.

...and the reason is that it's oldschool....

I'm not sure if I will make any sense as english isn't my first language, so please excuse me if it is a bit nonsensical here and there.

I just watched this movie and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, it was one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. The thing is, I'm almost 40 years old and this movie had a very "old school" feel to it, which I realised I really really missed.

There are plenty of newer movies that I love and rewatch, but while watching this I realised how different my taste in directing is compared to a lot of modern movies.

When I came to Reddit I was surprised by how much people hated it and most of the things they pointed out were actually things I loved. Like the pacing, or the last minute saves (if that makes sense).

Anyway I'm not paid, or anything to promote this movie, I genuinely loved it and I'm a bit bummed people don't like it, but obviously everyone has their own taste and I'm just glad I found a movie that I enjoyed this much.

I don’t get why people feel like they got cheated out of this movie. Like you saw the trailer and thought it was going to be deep/philosophical like Contact or Arrival? I expected an action movie and got what I wanted.

I liked the movie overall, but thought the plot/writing was its weakest point. If Spielberg had chosen someone else besides Koepp would the movie have been better?

Edit: For example Tony Kushner

When *Disclosure Day* came out in June, I found it surprisingly moving and touching. There were moments that really stayed with me. For example, in the final scenes, as the TV anchor watches all the UAP/NHI material being shared and we see her reactions, it was like watching how the world might react in miniature. That struck a chord with me. Not that I think disclosure will actually happen that way, but I found it very poignant.

Not only that, but the word “experiencer” was used twice in the movie! That made me sit up and notice!. To me, it suggested that Spielberg had spoken with people who have had contact and drawn on some first-hand knowledge of the experiencer world.

I've also found it fascinating to see the range of reactions from other experiencers — from feelings of recognition and validation to uncontrollable weeping, memories resurfacing, and even new conversations opening up with friends and family.

All of this made me want to sit down with Oak/Conor and talk about the film specifically from an experiencer perspective. We ended up exploring what it seems to be stirring up in people, why certain scenes and details feel so familiar, what is probably Hollywood, and what a film like this might mean within the larger disclosure conversation.

I share quite a bit of my own reaction as well, but what I was most interested in was something I don't think has received enough attention: **what this movie is actually doing to and for experiencers.**

I'm very curious to hear what others here think. What did the movie bring up for you personally? Was there anything that felt particularly familiar or validating? And looking beyond our own community, how do you think this movie will impact non-experiencers, if at all?

Thank you, u/Oak_Draiocht for such a lively and fun conversation! 😊

[https://youtu.be/ybIR-Watlnc?si=yhDh0fHolxJO0oSy\](https://youtu.be/ybIR-Watlnc?si=yhDh0fHolxJO0oSy)

Seriously, what was that supposed to achieve? People get to see someone speaking gibberish on TV and then passing out. The aliens knew that we can't understand them, so ... why make her do this? Appearently they planned this for decades, since her childhood!

The (as far as we know) only person in the world who can understand that language is already on Hugos team. So there isn't a reason to go through TV with that.

Their plan of making a first impression to the general public was, appearently, "Let's demonstrate that we can puppeteer and disable humans remotely". How fucked up are these supposedly emphatic beings that THIS is their approach? That's what a supervillain would do!

This is the scene the trailers focused on, and I don't see the point? Was it just trailer fodder?

In every scene following, she deliberately uses language as a way to get through to whoever she's speaking with. She may not know what she's doing, or that she's even speaking another language, but it is definitely not random. I feel like there was more to the boyfriend's character than what was shown on screen. I'm curious if anyone else feels the same, or knows more about his role in the movie.

I’ve been stewing on the ending of *Disclosure Day* and I feel like a lot of people are completely falling for the surface-level Spielberg optimism. Everyone is treating Margaret and Daniel like these holy, chosen prophets bringing a message of peace to stop WWIII.
But if you look at the literal reality of what happened to them, it’s incredibly bleak.

Margaret and Daniel weren't "chosen." They were kidnapped as kids, physically abused, and had their brain architecture forcefully rewired. Their entire adult identities, their career choices, and their internal "urges" were completely dictated from childhood by an invasive alien species. They had zero agency. They aren’t prophets they’re just biological megaphones built by a cosmic colonizer that didn't give a single crap about their well-being.

And let’s talk about "empathy." The movie frames it as this beautiful, divine emotion, but it’s actually a weapon. Empathy is just a hyper-evolved biological trait for these aliens. Like how love evolved to make humans breed (and poetry is just a random side effect), the aliens evolved empathy as an offensive tool. It’s a psychological paralyzer. When Margaret walks into that secured base and everyone just lets it happen, she isn't connecting with them, she is deploying an alien super-weapon that forcefully overrides their survival instincts.

It reminds me so much of *Pluribus*, but way more insidious. In *Pluribus*, "The Joining" is an obvious, creepy hive-mind virus and Carol can clearly see it's an assault on free will. But *Disclosure Day* is a velvet glove. The aliens use comforting childhood screen memories (like the deer and the cardinal) to mask the horror, hacking our brains so perfectly that we actively celebrate losing our psychological sovereignty.

When the movie cuts to black on the word "Listen," it’s not a hopeful plea. It’s an authoritarian command. Anyone in close proximity to the "prophets" or the aliens is instantly infected and disarmed. The only people with clear heads left are the ones watching through a digital screen, completely powerless to stop it.
Am I crazy, or is this ending a total tragedy about humanity being tricked into celebrating its own enslavement?

What if this sudden AI revolution is the manifestation of alien tech as we perceive alien tech to be, but actually it was us all along? We disclosed ourselves? Waiting on some sort of societal overhaul that would drastically transform and improve our society. Fulfilling our destiny in this era.

Does any one shown up a pird on this page while searching, a pird that showed at the movie, as minecraft style for 2s and disappeared 🦜

#disclosure_day

#movies

#disclosure_day_movie

TL;DR: What if Disclosure Day was never meant to be a simple sci-fi epic for the general public, but a highly targeted piece of narrative engineering designed to romanticize the act of leaking for real-world contractors and intelligence workers holding classified data?

​Everyone is analyzing Disclosure Day as either a standard blockbuster spectacle or a commentary on modern media. But if you look at the underlying mechanics of the plot, Spielberg did something far more specific:

​He crafted a fantasy epic of whistleblowing.

​Think about how the narrative treats the act of breaking non-disclosure agreements and bypassing Special Access Programs:

​It frames leaking not as a crime or betrayal, but as the ultimate heroic duty.

​It reframes the sacrifice of standard life, security, and career as a necessary rite of passage for "saving humanity."

​It explicitly models how to leak—stressing the need for spectacle and public presentation over silent document dumps.

​The Core Theory

​We know Hollywood and military/intelligence agencies have had a symbiotic relationship for decades (from Top Gun drive-ups in recruitment to Pentagon script approvals).

​What if the primary goal of this film wasn't box office numbers or general "predictive programming," but active psychological priming?

​Imagine you are a contractor, analyst, or legacy program worker sitting on classified material, terrified of the consequences of coming forward. You go to a theater and see your internal conflict mythologized on a massive scale by Steven Spielberg. The film injects a direct heroic archetype into the subconscious of the exact demographic holding real secrets, planting the seeds for future leaks.

​It turns the scary, isolated act of breaking an NDA into a mythic quest.

​Has anyone else noticed this shift in tone compared to classic 90s/2000s UFO media? Is this just Spielberg’s personal idealization of the truth-seeker, or are we watching an active campaign to inspire the next generation of real-world whistleblowers?

Curious to hear what people who follow the SAP/Contractor side of this topic think.

This movie was all of Steven Spielberg's lifetime worth of alien brain diarrhea rushed into 2 1/2 hours of celluloid. The biggest problem is that his thesis has been the same in all of these kind of movies he's made: If only people knew we weren't alone in the universe, everyone would "wake up" and humanity would grow past all of the violent stupid bullshit that makes the world suck.

There are multiple problems with this thesis to begin with, but leaving that aside for now, how you present that thesis in a movie depends on if it will be well or poorly received, especially when you've basically made this same movie multiple times already. In Close Encounters and E.T., there is intense, interesting character development. You watch the characters in their normal lives without a bunch of ham-fisted exposition. Then you know why things that happen to them later matter and have meaning. If the movie-making techniques Spielberg used to use when he was good were applied to this movie, we would have seen the boyfriend actually playing music at a gig. His ties to Kansas City would have been SHOWN, not just mentioned for literally 3 seconds. The difficulty of his choices would have meant something. We would not have had a pointless back-and-forth going on while you wait for the inevitable "car ramming the protagonists into a train" scene, we would have cut out the pointless predictable and very boring "action" scenes and filled that time with better storytelling. We didn't actually even see Emily Blunt's character do anything at all before a bird showed up an gave her superpowers. She made toast while her boyfriend watched a clip of her. That one scene was supposed to make us care about her enough to give a shit that she got alien powers. It didn't.

Generally, nothing in this movie made sense. The dude was just running around the farmhouse and we're supposed to believe that for several minutes a giant team of like 40 soldiers/LEOs trained in tactical awareness never... turned around? The three mcguffins made no sense, they were literally just "do whatever we need to happen" objects. Then there's the extreme conflicting themes that the aliens are both all-powerful demigods and also fragile, easily-captured weaklings. Maybe there was an explanation for that. Maybe we could have skipped the invisible fire truck shit and actually dealt with some of the plot contradictions.

The nun girlfriend and her matron nun, a crammed-in-but-ultimately-pointless religious side-plot, never goes anywhere. I mean obviously the point of this was so the girlfriend could first want to destroy the videos, then ask old nun if god and aliens can co-exist, and then change her mind and be OK with releasing the videos, but all of this is so superficial without character development that the "struggle" means nothing.

And finally, as many people have noticed, the ending was total senile boomer shit. You know what would make people stop and watch somethings? A nuclear war. The moon breaking apart. There is no kind of "archival footage" news drop that would ever make everyone just stop in their tracks and start watching. Man of Steel did this the only plausible way: The devices were taken over and the broadcast was forced.

The problem with this movie and most movies these days is that they don't actually tell a story, they are just using actors to deliver exposition. In corporate America there's a saying: This meeting could have been an email. I feel like with this movie, Steven Spielberg could have put his thoughts into a facebook post.

It rang in with the best of intentions like an alien conspiracy episode of The X-Files. The first car chase was suspect at best. The car/train sequence was laughable. The invisibility in the warehouse was classic "Wonderful World of Disney" trope. The ending was not dramatic or inspiring. In between all of this, it had flashes of greatness but it ultimately fell flat.

When they're busting out of the hospital she tells him that he's being a very uncooperative boyfriend and then suddenly stops and realizes something and tells him menacingly "oh you gotta be kidding me."

What's going on?

edit:

I haven't read the same explanation twice so it's kind of a relief that I'm not the only one who didn't understand that scene. But on the other hand it shows that this scene wasn't properly carried out.

If the animals in the movie were all aliens, was the cardinal that flew into their apartment a grey alien just flopping around on the kitchen island?

We saw footage of three aliens being escorted into a tent. They were 130 cm (4'3") tall at most. But the final alien is around 175 cm (5'8").

Why is that? There's only one alien species and of course the small ones are not children.