If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you?
This is the question at the heart of Steven Spielberg’s return to making films about extre-terrestrials, Disclosure Day. It is also the tagline for the film, appearing in marketing materials plastered across the world and people’s screens.This is familiar territory for Spielberg, who famously processed his childhood and his parents’ divorce in both E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, before externalising the imagery of the September 11 terrorist attacks in his 2005 reimagining of War of the Worlds.
But this return to the world of extra-terrestrials is notable for the time in Spielberg’s career at which it arrives. As he approaches the end of his storied career as a director – while also showing no signs whatsoever of slowing down – his films have perhaps moved away from the blockbuster mold that he had such a huge hand in designing. It comes in the wake of his most obviously personal film The Fabelmans, a semi-autobiographical film exploring his own upbringing. Within this context, Disclosure Day arrives as a late-career swing for Spielberg in the form of perhaps one last big-budget blockbuster adventure.
Much like E.T. and Close Encounters in particular, this exploration of the question of extra-terrestrials functions as a vehicle for Spielberg to tell a story that is deeply personal, and therefore undeniably universal. It is characteristically broad in its appeal – this is a film that Spielberg wants everybody to see and engage with, because it carries a message that he clearly believes needs to be heard by the widest possible audience.
Josh O’Connor and Emily Blunt play Dr. Daniel Kellner and Margaret Fairchild, two individuals drawn together by a mysterious common past that resurfaces in eerie and unexplainable ways. David Koepp’s script drops both of them – and the audience along with them – right in the middle of a larger conspiracy surrounding the release of a cache of material that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that aliens not only exist, but have been experimented on and exploited by the American government. The mystery and tension that drives the plot of the film is not whether or not these aliens exist, but rather whether or not this knowledge will be released to the public and whether or not this is a good thing. Much like these central two characters, we are racing through chases, conspiracies and even possessions at such a breakneck speed that we struggle to keep up with the facts and paint a coherent picture of just exactly what is going on behind the scenes.
All of which works to reveal the real intentions behind Disclosure Day. It is an unsurprisingly sincere and sentimental message that is completely and utterly unapologetic. Because the point of the film is not, as you might have initially intuited from the tagline or trailer, that we should be afraid or suspicious of the possibility that we are not alone in the universe. If anything, the film reserves that suspicion for governments and agencies who suppress information for corporate and financial gain. Instead, Disclosure Day is actually a film about the importance of our ability to communicate beyond cultural and language barriers.
In an age when cynicism and burnout has largely led to a collective inability or unwillingness to engage meaningfully in anything that dares to suggest the audacity of hope or optimism, this is something that makes Disclosure Day a notable and much-needed breath of fresh air that Spielberg is uniquely equipped to deliver. This stubborn sincerity and optimism shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Spielberg’s work, but I suspect that it will certainly be jarring to anyone even passingly familiar with the state of science fiction cinema in the last decade or so. The closest comparison that I think can be made to Disclosure Day is actually Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival from 2016. Much like Arrival, Disclosure Day is a film that prioritises communication and empathy as crucial functionalities of our collective humanity. Without our ability to communicate and actually listen to each other beyond our self-imposed perforated lines of separation, we will be doomed to spiral deeper and deeper into our silos and sanctuaries until we no longer recognise our neighbours at all.
While Arrival is a much harder science fiction take on this concept, much more concerned with the actual detail of linguistics and communication, Disclosure Day is a much more emotional and misty-eyed take. Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor’s characters take on two sides of the thematic coin that Spielberg is tossing into the air as they both wrestle with their abilities that seem to have been mysteriously activated. For O’Connor, it is an innate ability to understand mathematics, the language of the universe. For Blunt, it is an uncanny ability to understand people, to “drop into their lives” and understand them totally in an instant. It is only when these two abilities coalesce that communication is fully allowed to flourish beyond boundaries – empathy and proficiency. Both are necessary, but when they are brought together they become something more than the sum of their parts.
The film also tackles the religious and theological implications of the existence of extra terrestrial life with an equally earnest approach. Josh O’Connor’s girlfriend Jane who has been dragged into the conspiracy through proximity, played by Eve Hewson, takes them to a convent as a makeshift safehouse, revealing a piece of her religious background. There she reconnects with Sister Maura, played by Elizabeth Marvel, and wrestles with the potentially earth shattering religious implications of the information they are carrying.
“If you found out we weren’t alone,” Jane asks, “would that frighten you?”
In response, much like Jesus often did, Sister Maura answers Jane’s question with another question. “Why would He make such a vast universe yet save it for only us?”
The arrival of Disclosure Day in theatres comes not long after the US Department of War declassified UFO files and launched a new website on the subject, something that you could very easily argue was nothing more than a brazen attempt to toss out something shiny to distract us from the much more terrestrial threat of President Trump’s appearance in the Epstein files. Regardless of how important or salient these UFO files actually are, they raise important questions that people of faith have already been wrestling with in the background. What does the implied existence of aliens do to our faith? How does it exist alongside a faith in a God? What does it say about our relationship with that God if we are, in fact, not alone?
Spielberg and writer Koepp approach this topic with a generous and empathetic heart, leaning into a humanist approach rather than the misanthropy this question can conjure. The theological thesis of the film unveils itself as this conversation between Jane and Sister Maura comes to its climax. Jane makes reference to the Genesis story of creation, positing that the existence of aliens would contradict scripture’s assertion that humanity are God’s supreme creation.
Sister Maura replies: “Genesis says we are God’s supreme creation on Earth.”
Disclosure Day asks us to destroy our assumption of superiority, whilst also positioning God — whatever the audience pictures in that place — as the only superiority. Not governments, not any race, not media, not commerce, not culture. Only once that illusion of superiority is dissipated can we truly embrace empathy for the other. And from a Christian perspective, only once that superiority is firmly restored to God alone, can we rid ourselves of the fear of the other and learn to truly love everybody.
In this day and age, that is a message that can only do more good than harm. For it to be delivered by Spielberg through the vehicle of a tightly paced, frequently funny, and masterfully directed blockbuster thriller – that is something that should be celebrated. I’ll take sincerity and earnest optimism over cynicism any day of the week.
Jonty writes about film, narrative and culture on his Substack, “Postcards from the Abyss”.
