Disclosure Day: Spielberg's Close Encounter with His Own Past
By Jeremy Clift, author of Born in Space: Unlocking Destiny
Steven Spielberg knows how to make an alien encounter exciting. He has been doing it for nearly half a century, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to E.T. and War of the Worlds. His latest venture, Disclosure Day, delivers a thrilling climax, but getting there involves a familiar journey through some of the director's most well-worn storytelling devices.
I watched the film on a trans-Atlantic flight. The early part of the movie feels almost like a tour of Spielberg's favorite themes: ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events, shadowy government agencies concealing monumental secrets, and frightened individuals seeking refuge from forces they barely understand. I confess I groaned when one of the safe houses turned out to be a nunnery. Back to the God and Aliens trope!
Interestingly, Spielberg himself seems aware of the repetition. In a June 14 interview with The New York Times, he acknowledged that certain themes recur throughout his work. "In science fiction, I'm guilty as charged," he admitted, although he insisted that he never deliberately sets out to make the same film again. Nevertheless, the mother superior turns out to be quite broad-minded.
Captivating performances
Fortunately, the performances provide much of the film's momentum. Emily Blunt is brilliant as Margaret Fairchild, bringing conviction and emotional intensity to a story that might otherwise collapse under the weight of its mysteries. Josh O'Connor is equally engaging as Daniel Kellner, a WARDEX whistleblower whose appealing earthiness grounds the more extravagant elements of the plot. He makes the extraordinary seem almost plausible.
Colin Firth, however, seems oddly miscast as the head of WARDEX. His grey beard and strangely impassive appearance make him look at times like an AI-generated figure rather than a flesh-and-blood character. Perhaps that otherworldly quality is intentional, but his performance never quite convinced me.
More troubling are the contradictions in the film's treatment of alien technology. We encounter a mysterious device apparently capable of teleportation and allowing its user to move in and out of other people's consciousnesses. This suggests a civilization whose understanding of physics, space, and the mind is almost unimaginably advanced.
Yet these same aliens apparently have an unfortunate habit of crashing their spacecraft on Earth, leaving behind wreckage and bodies for government investigators to collect. How can beings capable of travelling millions of miles across space, and manipulating consciousness itself, be so accident-prone? And why do so many encounters with extraterrestrial intelligence seem to end with another crashed spaceship?
Of course, science fiction does not have to explain every technological mystery. Indeed, some of its greatest achievements depend on preserving a sense of wonder. But the best science fiction establishes a convincing internal logic, even when its underlying science lies far beyond our present understanding. Here, the different elements of alien technology sometimes seem assembled to serve the plot rather than emerging from a coherent vision of an extraterrestrial civilization.
Spielberg's interview sheds some light on his approach. He praised Denis Villeneuve's Arrival for imagining aliens radically different from human beings, yet explained that he had deliberately based his own extraterrestrials on descriptions from alleged UFO encounters. He cited the accumulated testimony of witnesses, including the much-discussed 1994 Ariel School incident in Zimbabwe.
Spielberg has never seen a UFO himself, but he now finds the testimony sufficiently compelling to believe those who claim to have encountered them. Curiously, however, he deliberately avoided speaking to whistleblowers while developing Disclosure Day. His film draws upon decades of UFO mythology and more recent reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, but remains firmly a work of fiction.
This helps explain both its fascination and its limitations. Spielberg seems less interested in imagining a genuinely unfamiliar extraterrestrial civilization than in exploring what might happen if the extraordinary claims circulating in contemporary UFO culture turned out to be true.
The film reminded me of Luis Elizondo's Imminent, his account of investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena within the American national security establishment. Elizondo describes secret government programs, extraordinary craft apparently defying conventional physics, encounters with nonhuman intelligence, and decades of official concealment. The implications, if substantiated, would transform our understanding of humanity's place in the universe.
Yet Imminent left me with a similar sense of frustration. Its claims are extraordinary, but much of the promised revelation remains tantalizingly beyond the reader's grasp. The narrative repeatedly approaches the threshold of disclosure without quite crossing it. What should be an unveiling becomes another invitation to believe that the decisive evidence exists somewhere behind a classified door.
Spielberg faces a comparable challenge. The possibility that humanity is not alone is one of the most profound ideas science fiction can explore. It raises questions about our origins, our future, and whether human civilization is merely one small episode in a much larger cosmic story. But invoking those questions is easier than answering them, and spectacular special effects cannot entirely substitute for a convincing intellectual revelation.
Yet perhaps Spielberg is asking us to look elsewhere for the film's meaning.
In his interview, he explained that Disclosure Day is fundamentally concerned with humanity's loss of community and its declining capacity for empathy. The extraordinary abilities of his central characters, he suggested, are less important than their capacity to understand other people. Alien contact becomes a means of asking whether a shared realization that we are not alone might bring a divided humanity closer together.
That is an appealing ambition, particularly at a time when societies seem increasingly fractured. It also offers a more sympathetic reading of the film's consciousness-related technology, which may be intended as a metaphor for empathy rather than simply another piece of extraterrestrial wizardry.
Nevertheless, a film can have admirable intentions without fully realizing them. Spielberg's humanistic message is familiar from much of his earlier work, and I was left wondering whether Disclosure Day had discovered anything substantially new to say about either humanity or its imagined extraterrestrial visitors.
For all these reservations, the film builds toward an exciting climax that demonstrates Spielberg's continuing mastery of cinematic spectacle and suspense. When the action accelerates, Disclosure Day becomes genuinely gripping, and its strongest performances help carry us past some of the narrative inconsistencies.
Perhaps my disappointment stems from expecting more than another accomplished alien-conspiracy thriller. Spielberg helped define the modern cinematic language of extraterrestrial contact. Nearly fifty years after Close Encounters, I had hoped he might offer a genuinely new perspective on what encountering another intelligence would mean.
Disclosure Day certainly knows how to generate anticipation. Whether it ultimately discloses enough to justify that anticipation is another matter.
— Jeremy Clift, author of Born in Space, Space Vault, and Space Shield. Read Clift’s profile on Kirkus.
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