What Is Disclosure Day Actually About?

Or rather, it was initially the US government, up until President Nixon brought an actor friend to check out a few alien corpses. At that point, Wardex, a corporation run for at least the past 35 years by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) realized that Presidents become civilians after eight years (not exactly true, but moving on), so began to leave them out of the circle of trust. Wardex, an independent government contractor, became the sole steward of all alien knowledge and technology, using it to progress tech in the outside world, torture aliens, and hold three cylindrical artifacts that can do anything from make a man teleport to control minds to essentially work as a TV remote. That last one is less impressive, though it is the final thing we see an artifact do in the movie, so your mileage may vary on how exciting that is.

While Wardex has been studying and dissecting these alien visitors, they’ve continued to visit us. In 1996, they took two people to their ships: younger versions of Margaret and Daniel. Appearing as animals like an elk, a raccoon, and a cardinal so that the children wouldn’t be scared, they led Margaret to an old fairytale-looking house where it snows upside down outside and fundamentally changed both Margaret and Daniel, granting them fantastic abilities.

Those abilities boil down to telepathy and linguistics, respectively, though they take more forms than that. However, while the movie doesn’t explicitly state this out loud, it seems after the encounter with the aliens, Margaret likely read her father’s mind and ran away from him — the event was so traumatic that she suppressed her abilities for years. Daniel simply cannot remember his childhood and also suppressed his abilities until one of the aliens in animal guise looked in on him during college when he was a hard-partying almost dropout, unlocking his power to read math like a language and allowing him to get hired by Wardex. Daniel didn’t know that aliens had gifted him a power, or that he had a power at all; the only thing Daniel knew was that he could suddenly understand complex math and code.

At Wardex, Daniel met Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), a man who works with extraterrestrial biology and who communicated directly with the aliens. At some point, one of the aliens escaped (who we see towards the end of the movie), and began to manipulate events behind the scenes to lead up to Disclosure Day. Along with Hugo, that alien hatched a complex plan to bring Margaret and Daniel back together so they could activate their Wonder Twins powers and reveal the truth about aliens to the world. Why? We’ll get more into that in the next section, but the major argument throughout the movie is that the knowledge of aliens does not belong to a secretive government-adjacent company or cabal — it belongs to the eight billion people who live on planet Earth.

That plan was to have a section of Wardex employees defect on moral grounds and begin building a scale replica of Margaret’s childhood home. Hugo and company were aware that Margaret had powers, but they were waiting for her to be activated… which she is, by one of the aliens masquerading as a cardinal. That leads to the events we see in the movie, where Margaret and Daniel loop their way around multiple times until they come to Hugo’s version of Margaret’s house, all built to allow her to confront the trauma of her alien abduction and get ready for — you guessed it — Disclosure Day.

And that does happen, as Hugo and company bring Margaret to KCXE in Kansas City, dump all the footage of every alien encounter for nearly three-quarters of a century onto the world, and reveal the existence of aliens among us. But as to what the movie is about, it’s to bring Daniel and Margaret — two halves of the same alien experiment — together, make them face their trauma, and come out better and more confident people for it. It’s also so the escaped alien can whisper something to Daniel, who translates it for Margaret, who then goes and tells the world, “listen.” The end!

Disclosure Day Images