Disclosure Day Offers The Finale The X-Files Needed

I spent years imagining a third X-Files movie. Finally there’d be some pay off to the mythology, the meandering alien conspiracy storyline amounting to something, a true finale. 2012, the year of the apparent alien invasion, came and went with no new film and my fantasies about Mulder and Scully in a race to save the world remained just that: a fantasy. Until Disclosure Day came along. The 2026 Steven Spielberg film, seemingly his final word of alien cinema, is that true third X-Files film I dreamt of.

Surely it’s hard for anyone to watch Disclosure Day and not think of The X-Files, not just obsessed fans like myself. The film’s ideas aren’t new, they all feel ripped out of the nineties show and its spin-off movie. The ideas weren’t new back in the nineties either, the series  collecting UFO lore from the preceding few decades and shaping it into one narrative. I was expecting a fresher take from Spielberg rather than recycled concepts. I couldn’t believe it had Roswell crash footage when that is the most tired, trite aspect to include. But this all made it feel more like an X-Files finale, not homaging its best episodes but its more weary later seasons. It’s Spielberg doing his best Chris Carter impression, flaws and all.

The main characters are essentially Mulder and Scully. Josh O’Connor is an actor I find sometimes works for me (Wake Up Dead Man, Rebuilding) and sometimes doesn’t. Here he’s fairly drab and low key, a little bland, like how David Duchovny can be, a fine line between his clever underplaying of scenes and clearly not caring. Eve Hewson’s Jane is in the Scully role, who like many mythology episodes of The X-Files has little to do outside of questioning the religious implications of aliens in discussions that aren’t anywhere near as insightful as the film thinks. She’s off on her own, talking to nuns, while Daniel Kellner/Mulder meets with abductees and gets into car chases. Sounds like The X-Files to me.

The relationship between Daniel and Jane in Disclosure Day doesn’t work at all. The film wants to pick up right in the middle of things, the relationship already made rocky by secrets, but I never bought them as a couple. I can’t imagine them being together when they aren’t on the run. Slotting in Mulder and Scully would make sense and improve the film. Instant chemistry and believable conflict. This could easily, with the tiniest of edits, become a script for a third X-Files film. The character roles are all there, including the villainous Scanlon as the Cigarette-Smoking Man. David Koepp apparently wrote 42 drafts of the script so what’s one more to swap out some character names?

Clearly Spielberg conceived of the film’s ending first and worked backwards from there. The plot to get to that point is more than a little ropey. There’s no real reason for it to be an action film. We get an extended chase scene, an escape to a new location, a repetitive dialogue scene to edge the plot along, the characters are discovered again, rinse and repeat. Although while the film largely fell flat for me (I said it was how I fantasied a third X-Files movie would be, not that I could fantasise a good one) there are some flashes of Spielbergian magic. I’ll gladly take a car chase directed by Spielberg and scored by John Williams in 2026. But this awkward forcing of the story to be a big action film reminded me even more so of The X-Files, particularly that first film from 1998, which attempted to be a blockbuster despite having a story which didn’t justify it.

Disclosure day, like The X-Files, is about shadowy secrets, hushed conversations, and apparently endless phone calls. Thankfully it drops the action and spectacle for a third act which is all about revealing information. That’s what The X-Files should have always been about, what it should have been leading to. Mulder and Scully aren’t action heroes, as much as the show wanted to occasionally claim otherwise. Even in a hypothetical third film dealing with the alien colonisation, I never needed it to turn into Independence Day. I didn’t want interplanetary war with Mulder and Scully leading the charge. It is a show about the search for the truth and should have ended with them discovering the truth and releasing it. Surely that was always ingrained as their final act but the show/films refused to get there.

The ending of Disclosure Day is therefore immensely satisfying and vindicating as a long-suffering X-Files fan. It gave me the ending I was hoping for, just not officially as part of that franchise. The whole sequence is maybe overlong, somewhat unbelievable and cheesy at points, but I admire its earnestness and also the boldness to end a film like that rather than with a big shoot-out. To treat the truth with respect. The alien in a wheelchair pushes things into too silly a territory for me, I would have changed that, especially because the CGI alien looked so bad. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (an underrated film) had better looking aliens. The final beat of ‘listen’ also isn’t my favourite but if you swapped out the characters for Mulder and Scully it still makes for a solid ending to The X-Files, the truth now truly out there.

Of course, a third X-Files film never happened but we did get two revival seasons of the show. Those seasons gave us a couple of good episodes (literally a couple, Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster and Rm9sbG93ZXJz) but the wider mythology storyline was abysmal. Some of the worst television I’ve ever seen and a deeply unsatisfying ending. But now, with very little effort, Disclosure Day can act as the third movie I can slot into The X-Files mythology as a satisfying-enough finale. Or, who knows, maybe Ryan Coogler’s new reboot will not only be a new beginning for the show but eventually offer a fitting end too.