Spoiler alert: This article discusses scenes and themes from Disclosure Day. If you haven’t seen it yet and want to go in cold, bookmark this and come back after your trip to the theater.
Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s new sci-fi thriller starring Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor, doesn’t just ask whether humans are ready to learn we’re not alone. It asks: If we met individuals from another world, would we greet them with compassion, or with cages, scalpels, and secrecy?
That question makes Disclosure Day hit far harder than your average summer alien movie. Critics have framed it as a conspiracy thriller about truth, fear, and contact, but what really lingers is its plea for empathy.
In the film, cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner and meteorologist Margaret Fairchild are drawn into a dangerous story of hidden alien contact and a powerful operation determined to keep the truth buried. That premise alone gives Disclosure Day plenty of suspense, but the movie’s emotional core comes from what those secrets actually contain: not wonder, not noble scientific discovery, but violence against beings who never consented to it.
When Daniel shows Jane, played by Eve Hewson, classified footage and warns her that it’s hard to watch, the movie shifts from intriguing to devastating. The video shows humans experimenting on an alien. One clip shows a visibly distressed alien pushing an experimenter away.
Look familiar? It should. Animals used in experiments don’t consent, and they fight against the pain and terror vivisectors inflict on them.
That moment cuts so deep because it strips away every excuse humans use to justify violence against “others.” The victim doesn’t need to speak English. The victim doesn’t need to look like us. The victim doesn’t need to come from Earth. Pain is pain. Fear is fear.
If viewers feel horrified watching someone from another world endure experiments, they should ask themselves a harder question after the credits roll: Why does society still tolerate experiments on mice, monkeys, dogs, rats, and other animals who also struggle, panic, resist, and suffer?
That’s what makes Disclosure Day more than a sleek conspiracy blockbuster. It becomes an accidental—or maybe intentional—mirror. When humans in the film encounter beings they don’t understand, many of them don’t respond with humility. They respond with domination. They cage first. They cut first. They rationalize first. If that feels ugly, good. It should.
But there’s also hope. Daniel and Margaret fight to show the world’s past wrongs so that we can be better. Kind of like every undercover investigation or exposé PETA releases.
Maybe that’s the biggest reason this film works right now. It believes empathy can interrupt violence. It believes listening matters. It believes that when living beings communicate distress—even in unfamiliar ways—we have an obligation to respond with care, not conquest.
So yes, see Disclosure Day for the intrigue, the performances, the mystery, and the summer-movie thrill of it all. But stay with it for the harder truth pulsing underneath the plot: A being doesn’t have to look like you, sound like you, or come from your world to deserve consideration and the right to live on their own terms.
If one painful scene of someone resisting experimentation breaks your heart, don’t stop at heartbreak. Let it challenge you to recognize every animal as someone—and to defend their right to exist for their own reasons, not ours.
Push science forward here:
If you live in the U.S., sign our petition! Urge your members of Congress to introduce legislation enacting Research Modernization NOW, which would push U.S. biomedical research away from cruel, useless experiments on animals and instead and promote modern, animal-free research.
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