Steven Spielberg is one of those people who has separate Wikipedia pages for his biography, his filmography, and his awards. Since his debut in 1973, the director has averaged two stone cold classics per decade. There are the perfect summer blockbusters Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark; the greatest one-two punch in cinema history, Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, both released in 1993; Tom Hanks’ finest hour in Saving Private Ryan; the millennial sci-fi twofer of A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report; and Daniel Day Lewis’ stunning turn in Lincoln. His little-seen West Side Story adaptation, released during the pandemic, is a marvel. There’s a reason he’s the most financially successful director in cinema history.
The subject Spielberg keeps coming back to since Firelight, which he directed at age 17, is aliens. That early experiment spawned my favorite Spielberg film, 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Released during the height of the 1970s UFO craze, Close Encounters is the story of an ordinary guy, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), whose life is turned upside down by a chance encounter with an alien spaceship. Roy leaves his unhappy marriage with Ronnie (Teri Garr) to chase after aliens, which, lo and behold, are not only real, but also have a plan which involves him. Close Encounters portrays aliens like the ancients portrayed gods — powerful creatures from the sky whose mysterious actions are in the service of an inscrutable agenda.
As a narrative of first contact, Close Encounters sells transcendence with a hefty assist from a career-best score by John Williams. The film ends with Roy leaving Earth (and his family) with the aliens, never to be seen again. The secret, quasi-governmental program led by Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut) to make first contact is successful, but after they take off, the aliens’ existence is presumably kept secret. That’s where Spielberg’s 35th feature film comes in.
Disclosure Day starts in medias res with an ass kicking. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is nervously watching a wrestling match when the person beside him sticks a gun in his ribs. When the black-clad operatives lead him out of the arena, we learn that he has betrayed his employer, the Wardex Corporation, led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). Wardex flunkies find the hard drives and memory cards they were looking for in his backpack, but there’s one thing missing: a banana-sized chunk of gray metal with weird symbols carved into it. When Daniel reveals that he has an alien device, Scanlon freaks out — or at least as close as the cold, corporate jargon-spewing leader of a public-private security partnership dedicated to suppressing evidence of alien visitations to earth can come to freaking out.
Daniel escapes his captors, kicking off the same kind of cross-country chase through the American heartland that was so gripping in Close Encounters, with his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) in tow. Meanwhile, TV meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is lamenting her stalled-out career. She’s stuck in Kansas City with her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell), but dreaming of a new job in a bigger media market. When she plays him her news anchor audition video, we learn that the world is on the brink of nuclear war over the collapse of the North Korean government. Just then, a cardinal flies into the couple’s apartment through an open window. The bird makes eye contact with Margaret for a few seconds, then flies away. Jackson is amazed by the bird’s unusual behavior. He’s even more amazed when Margaret starts speaking Russian — and positively shocked when he finds out she doesn’t realize she’s speaking Russian.
After a brief encounter at her TV station where she translates for the South Korean ambassador (she doesn’t speak Korean, either), Margaret tries to deliver her 90-second weather report, but the words stick in her throat. Instead, she starts speaking in an unknown language. Afterwards, her producers and Jackson send her to the hospital for a neurological checkup. She’s seemingly fine, but there are three FBI agents waiting outside to “interview” her. Margaret discovers she can now read minds when she realizes that they are not, in fact, feds. She escapes the hospital with a very reluctant Jackson in tow, knowing only that she is looking for a guy named Daniel, and that he’s somewhere to the north.
While Daniel and Margaret try to find each other, they have the help of Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), another Wardex employee who masterminded the breakout. He’s coordinating the operation which he and his secret team hope will spill the beans about aliens to a world on the brink of destruction. Back at the lab, Scanlon is trying desperately to keep his government contacts from finding out that he’s lost control of the alien archive. To aid in his search, he uses another alien device to amplify his psychic powers, leading to a series of tense scenes of possession and betrayal, as he tries to turn Jane against Daniel. The aliens, of course, also have a say in the proceedings.
UFO flaps come and go, and we’ve recently been in the middle of another one, inspired by images and videos leaked from the U.S. Navy. Whether those videos show an actual alien spacecraft or just the same ambiguous lights in the sky which have fueled the UFO myth since Kenneth Arnold first saw “flying saucers” in 1947 remains an open question. But the sense of wonder that question inspires in Spielberg (born 1946) remains potent after all these years. Both Close Encounters and Disclosure Day have ordinary citizens chased by mysterious forces which converge in a climax that reveals the aliens behind the UFOs. It probably goes without saying that Close Encounters does it better. Spielberg is a horror director at heart, but his natural optimism always shines through. Disclosure Day features the big action set pieces that Spielberg does as well as anyone who has ever picked up a camera. He pauses every now and then to debate the wisdom of disclosing the existence of alien life to the masses of humanity. Jane, the former nun, asks her mother superior (Elizabeth Marvel) if the existence of aliens disproves the existence of god. Scanlon believes that the reveal would cause major societal upheaval and collapse, while Hugo says, “Look around you. We’re already collapsing.”
Personally, I loved Disclosure Day. But I realize that the mixture of ’70s paranoia cinema, rollicking chase scenes, and philosophical debates makes for a bumpy ride. Spielberg channels The Day the Earth Stood Still to posit that the aliens want to help us Earthlings work through our troubles, and that once the world realizes that we are not alone, we will do better as a species. But I have been a journalist long enough to know that just because you tell someone the truth doesn’t mean that they will act on it, or even care. Furthermore, the real disclosure day may have already come and gone. Earlier this year, NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover found compelling evidence that microbial life existed on the Red Planet in the distant past. The astrobiology community is simply waiting to get Curiosity’s samples into an earthly laboratory to make it official. (Naturally, the Trump administration is trying to cut the funding for the sample return mission.) And yet, we’re still a world of short-sighted apes on the brink of self-destruction. As noted alien believer Carl Sagan said, “In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
