This 4K Blu-ray underlined why Spielberg is the sci-fi master – but not how I expected
Disclosure Day is an odd cookie, but what a looker it is
I have a rule that I try to stick to – if I have the opportunity to pick up a Steven Spielberg movie on physical media, especially if I haven't seen it, I'll do so. He's one of the great living directors, and his place in the canon is secure, but he's also a movie-maker whose films really deserve proper treatment.
Streaming can be brilliant for access, but the difference in playback quality, from sharpness and depth of colour right through to surround sound, is huge when you start playing 4K Blu-rays more regularly. Spielberg's latest, Disclosure Day, underlines this perfectly.
It's a movie I missed when it hit cinemas earlier this year, so the chance to get a screener seemed like an obvious win, and having sat and watched it on a midweek evening, it's an interesting step for Spielberg in story terms. It continues his fascination with the question of how we'd receive extraterrestrial visitors, and seems like almost an update of how he thinks it might unfold in 2026.
That compares to the obvious old hits of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and it's a fairly fascinating triptych when viewed in that light, albeit I think Disclosure Day is rather clearly the weakest of the three films.
It stars Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor as a pair of people beset by baffling knowledge – they both discover at different times in their lives that they can understand languages and concepts previously foreign to them, like a gift of knowledge. They're drawn together while a shadowy private company tries everything it can to stop them from revealing what they know.
In point of fact, what they know is that aliens are real and have been visiting our planet for some time, covered up by a succession of governments, but it doesn't really help to examine that idea too closely.
Rather, Disclosure Day is about the ride these two strangers go on, and the movie really unfolds as one long chase sequence as they both dodge around the machinations of that evil corporation. It's fun enough, but doesn't really have the clarity and thematic emphasis of some of Spielberg's best stuff.
What it does have, though, on 4K disc, is a whacking great sound mix that's extremely cinematic and underlines what streaming can't bring to the table. My living room setup now comprises the excellent Sonos Beam Ultra, along with the Sub Mini and two Era 100s for rear channels, and it's a pretty tidy surround system in all.
There are a few car chases in the film, and all of them sound rounded and powerful, but one particular scene involving a couple of freight trains is particularly impactful. The sub-bass that Spielberg uses is just tremendous, and on a good system it'll have your seat shaking in a way that I've never heard a streaming service manage.
This is something that's familiar if you have other Spielberg movies on disc – I couldn't believe the noise generated by the first UFO arrival in Close Encounters when I saw it on Blu-ray for the first time, and that feeling of almost discomfort was echoed here.
Impressively, the dynamic range employed is still relatively carefully calibrated, though. I didn't have an issue with whisper-quiet dialogue even at a fairly reasonable overall volume, something that I can't really say about (for example) some Nolan movies on disc.
4K disc evangelists like me might make people assume that it's all about the pixel-peeping when comparing sources, but Disclosure Day is another great little example of how it's really the sound that's the biggest single upgrade (in my opinion). If you want to see Spielberg's latest without the compromise of muted audio, I'd say you know what you have to do.
