Join The Club
Disclosure Day’s box office debut last weekend started Steven Spielberg's latest on a winning note, but it has since become one of the more polarizing releases to be on the 2026 movie schedule. It feels like those who went to see it either were getting chills over its third act or asking themselves if anything actually happened in the movie. While I fall in the camp of someone who really enjoyed it, I want to talk about why it made me think about Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull lately.
The 2008 sequel is famously criticized for not being as good as the other movies in the franchise, but honestly, I don’t think it’s as bad as everyone thinks it is – it’s just not as great as the original trilogy. Anyways, the ending of Disclosure Day particularly has me thinking about Indiana Jones 4. Let’s get into it.
Remember The Alien Scene In Indiana Jones 4?
While Spielberg, Harrison Ford and screenwriter David Koepp reportedly were never fully on board with aliens being in the movie, Indiana Jones 4 very much has them like Disclosure Day. Aside from them both being directed by Spielberg from a script by Koepp, and involving aliens, there's more to it.
At their bare bones, the two films revolve around a piece of alien evidence that one group has and another group very much would like to have instead. In Indiana Jones 4, it’s Indy vs. the Soviets led by a particularly goofy Cate Blanchett performance. But what you may not remember is that the Crystal Skull involves a telepathic element that leads the humans of the story to connect with the aliens in the story. Sounding familiar yet?
Ultimately, both groups end up at a temple where they return the Crystal Skull to a skeleton inside, triggering aliens from another dimension to appear. The extraterrestrial ends up transferring way too much knowledge to Blanchett’s Soviet agent character, effectively overloading her brain and killing her. Indy and his crew quickly escape the temple, and a flying saucer rises from the ruins and returns to the otherworldly place they came from.
Disclosure Day's Finale Reminds Me Of It, But Better
This brings me to Disclosure Day. Both movies play with the idea of aliens, but whereas Indiana Jones 4 does so with a more basic “good vs. evil” plotline about tech from another world potentially falling into the wrong hands, Spielberg's new movie is weighing something else. What if our present-day world had definite proof of the existence of aliens and the world got to discover it together? Both movies only really take us to the discovery stage of extraterrestrial life, and stop there. But where I felt empty with Indiana Jones, I felt fed with Disclosure Day.
There's an added thought-provoking element that had me imagining how our world would change should everyone at the same time get the kind of moment usually only reserved for larger-than-life heroes like Indiana Jones. It had me thinking about humanity and the ways in which we have the great power to both come together and tear things apart. I didn’t need more from Disclosure Day, because it gave me enough to ponder about ourselves, whereas I feel like in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull I would have been a lot more satisfied if Indy got to talk to an alien for a bit, ya know?
Ultimately, it feels like the same filmmakers unintentionally played with a very similar concept, just 18 years apart, and found a way to ultimately explore it better through Disclosure Day. As someone who liked Spielberg's latest movie, I'm more grateful for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull now that I've made these connections.
