This essay discloses the ending of the movie Disclosure Day, so do not read if you want to avoid the truth until it is revealed to you in theaters.
In The X-Files, special agent Fox Mulder kept a poster in his office featuring a photo of a flying saucer worthy of a 1950s pulp novel cover above the words “I Want To Believe.” It was not a declaration of faith, but an admission of desire—and a very relatable aspect of human behavior. Sure, the poster says, UFO conspiracies may be a little nuts, but wouldn’t it be fantastic if they weren’t? For fellow travelers, Steven Spielberg’s newest movie, Disclosure Day, is a deliverance.
Few want to believe more than Spielberg, the 79-year-old film director and producer whose early empire was built off the back of adventure, fantasy, thrills, and, in some key cases, aliens from outer space. Though today equally respected for prestige dramas and historical epics, he’s always kept a foot in science fiction. The prolific auteur brought this duality home well in 1993, releasing both Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park in the same calendar year, and again in 2005, releasing Munich and War of the Worlds. He can look back with pride at spearheading the historical archive at the USC Shoah Foundation, but he can also rely on a solid payday whenever there’s a new installment in the noisy and childish Transformers franchise, of which he is an executive producer.
Spielberg has gone back to the extra terrestrial well this summer with Disclosure Day, a movie very much in dialogue with his first science fiction hit, 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As a fast-paced thriller with no shortage of action, otherworldly technology, and weird phenomena, it largely succeeds. Spielberg and his usual collaborators (cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, composer John Williams, editor Sarah Broshar) exploit the language of cinema in superhuman ways, creating sequences that delight, enrapture, terrify (just a little), and delight. The guy’s rich and famous for a reason. Yet as I exited the theater, I was only on cloud eight. A friend and I agreed: “Yeah, he’s still got it, but he may be just a tad naive.” The movie’s thesis—that yoinking a Grey alien out of a Raiders of the Lost Ark-like warehouse and plopping it on the evening news will bring about world peace—is giving life in 2026 too much credit.
A silhouette of a person’s back stands out-of-focus in the immediate foreground, looking toward a group of small, slender, child-sized figures with large, bulbous heads and big black eyes. The small figures stand in clusters against a brightly glowing, overexposed white background, creating a stark, high-contrast silhouette effect.
Richard Dreyfuss on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind in this undated photo from the 1970s.Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images
Close Encounters is the mothership of Spielberg’s cinematic syntax. It’s also a summation of themes particular to the 1970s. The interplanetary adventure fits in nicely with the post-Watergate paranoia trend. If you recall, the United States government lies to its citizens about a chemical spill to clear the area for an alien visitation. A grand conspiracy is at play, but “they” are keeping it, and its mind-blowing truth, away from us. There’s also the fundamentally New Age aspects of the movie, beyond the obvious points concerning benevolent extra-terrestrial life using sound and light to communicate: Lead character Roy (Richard Dreyfuss) is called—forced, really—to take a voyage of self-discovery and advancement, escaping the shackles of rote suburban life. (It’s worth noting, however, that once Spielberg became a father, he renounced his protagonist’s deadbeat-dad turn.)
These 1970s tropes were tamped down for Spielberg’s next engagement with aliens, 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which, apart from being thrilling and funny and heartbreaking, was one of the more groundbreaking mainstream films to address the balkanization of the nuclear family—a topic of great concern among Reagan-era conservatives wishing to undo much of the previous decade’s social change. This is not to suggest that Spielberg made an inherently reactionary film, but, like in Close Encounters, he used aliens to address the big social issues of the period. E.T.’s fundamental message of “be good” (you can hear it with the music swelling, right?) offers the only reasonable advice for heartbroken children aiding their new pal on his adventure to return home.
It’s worth noting that E.T. began its life as a much darker project called Night Skies, a non-sequel follow-up to Close Encounters in which a family were terrorized by a group of aliens—one of whom had a streak of kindness and who befriended the family’s son. At a certain point, Spielberg homed in on just that last bit, eventually crafting what might, at the end of the day, be his signature film. Ever the smart producer, though, he repurposed elements of the initial script for future projects directed by others, namely Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (a family under siege by forces not of this Earth) and Joe Dante’s Gremlins (the same, but funnier). The Reagan era was also, for many, a time in which U.S. entrepreneurs made spaceship-sized amounts of money.
