Deace, Dreher Destroy ‘Disclosure Day’ -‘Profoundly Evil’

Movie critics, by and large, hailed Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” as a return to form for the Oscar winner.

Not everyone was on the same page.

The film earned a “B” CinemaScore, a middling result for the populist director. And select conservative pundits trashed the film in no uncertain terms.

Rod Dreher, a film critic and Orthodox Christian, ravaged the film at his Substack page. He called the film both “profoundly religious” and “profoundly evil.”

“Disclosure Day proclaims a new religion, one that displaces Christianity (at least). It’s hard to believe that this is an accident. To be charitable, we could assume that Spielberg, no longer able to believe in the God of the Bible, and of his Hebrew ancestors, has transferred his hopes to aliens. That is the gospel he preaches in this film.

…you will never see so blatant an instantiation of the kind of propaganda that I believe will become more and more present as the world moves forward towards whatever climax is coming.”

Ouch.

The Blaze’s Steve Deace offered a similar smackdown from a religious perspective. He dubbed the film a “direct assault on Christianity.”‘

MY REVIEW OF DISCLOSURE DAY — A DIRECT ASSAULT ON CHRISTIANITY (AND SPIELBERG’S WORST MOVIE)

Because of how intentional I believe this film is in attempting to deconstruct Christianity, and because I want to warn people about not seeing it, this will be a very spoiler-filled…

— Steve Deace (@SteveDeaceShow) June 13, 2026

This is a rather blatant attempt to evangelize into a new religion. In many respects, the transition Steven Spielberg makes from his 1970s classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to now Disclosure Day, is very similar to what you see from a lot of the prominent UFO/alien obsession proxies like Dr. Steven Greer. At first they start off in wonderment about what else is really out there in the cosmos and whether we’re alone in the universe (or Close Encounters), but they always eventually end up at the aliens are really our saviors to show fallible human beings the way to salvation (or Disclosure Day).

Deace also called out the film’s inclusion of Christianity in a specific fashion.

At the convent we see several of the nuns desperately clinging to their Rosaries looking for guidance, while the Mother Superior lets out a wry smile in approval of the coming syncretism. No other religion is even depicted, let alone shown to have to grasp with the significance of all this. Why is that? All the potential answers to this question are bad. Though I’d love that to be the case, Christianity is not the only global religion on this planet. 

“Disclosure Day” earned a respectable $43 million in its debut frame, which is solid for an original story but hardly worth Spielberg’s track record. Will the film’s spiritual message hurt its word of mouth? Or will audiences take the story at face value and ignore what Dreher and Deace call out?