Steven Spielberg is no stranger when it comes to conflating the search for extraterrestrials with the search for the divine. Hell, he’s been doing it all the way back to Firelight, the movie he made as a teenager that has since been lost to time. He returned to that movie’s themes in his 1977 opus Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which asks some very pointed questions about our place in the universe.
At a time when many were rightly down on the US government in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, Spielberg cut through that skepticism by looking to the skies with an almost religious sense of wonder. “Maybe we aren’t alone in the universe,” Close Encounters says. “Maybe aliens do exist. And if aliens exist, maybe even God exists. And if God does exist, maybe God is kind.”
Where so many films before it used aliens as a metaphor for The Other—filtering our fears about other people through the lens of the supernatural—Close Encounters looks at aliens and simply sees Another, one more intelligent life form for us to engage with. To Spielberg, aliens are people too, which is about as humanistic an outlook as you can get.
Nearly fifty years later, Spielberg returns to those ideas with Disclosure Day, which takes much of the same material and projects it onto the current moment. In a world that seems to teeter on the brink of destruction for one reason or another every other week, what would unite us all once again in a sense of wonder? What would make us put down our guns, let go of our resentments, and come together as a united species?
Depending on your religious persuasion, the answer to those questions might be something of a revelation; something apocalyptic in its scope. Some world leaders consider the only means of achieving peace once and for all to be in somehow triggering the Second Coming. In the hands of another filmmaker, the title of this film could easily have been Judgement Day.
But despite pushing eighty years old, Spielberg is still the benevolent storyteller he’s always been. His latest film is a bracing shot of optimism injected into a world that likens optimists with suckers. Spielberg’s always believed in humanity’s better angels, and demonstrates that in Disclosure Day, a film that acknowledges the Powers That Be will always try to suppress The Truth, but The Truth (like life itself) will always find a way.
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
– John 8:32 (KJV)
[LET IT BE KNOWN: THE ABOVE BIBLE VERSE OFFICIALLY COUNTS AS A SPOILER ALERT. WHICH I GUESS THIS STATEMENT ALSO DOES. SO NEVER MIND.]
Disclosure Day finds government whistleblower Daniel (Josh O’Connor) and TV meteorologist Margaret (Emily Blunt) on the run from the feds. Daniel has stolen sensitive video evidence documenting our government’s long history of dealing with extraterrestrials. The videos in his possession date back to the 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico. Characters keep referring to our government’s alien coverup as an 80-year ordeal1. Daniel intends to bring this coverup to an end, working with a team of government dissidents (spearheaded by Coleman Domingo’s Hugo) to release the footage and disclose evidence of aliens to the whole world. Hence the movie’s title.
The timing of this is crucial, it turns out, because the world is on the brink of World War III. It’s never outright stated in the movie, but one assumes the people behind releasing this footage want to do so in an attempt to avert imminent disaster.
Josh’s girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), doesn’t necessarily see it that way. Once she learns what Josh is wrapped up in, she urges him not to go through with it, believing that revealing the existence of aliens will wreak havoc on the faiths of billions of people. Jane, coming from a Catholic upbringing and a former novitiate herself, simply can’t reconcile her faith in God with the idea that God created something other than us. The head of her monastery (Elizabeth Marvel) is quick to console her, pointing out that the Bible is very clear in stating that God made humanity the dominant life form “on Earth”. Which is a cute little technicality, and suggests that whoever wrote the Bible thousands of years ago knew something that we currently don’t. But I digress.
So how does Margaret figure into all of this? As the film unfolds, she finds herself suddenly able to read people’s inner thoughts simply by looking them in the eye. The cop who pulls her over is having marital troubles; her boss is taking his frustrations over his kid out on her; her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) is happy in Kansas City and doesn’t want to have to move again for her job. And then when she gets in front of a TV camera to read the weather, she begins speaking in alien clicks and gasps. Unsure of what’s happening to her, she finds herself in touch with Hugo, who tells her to seek out Daniel; she’ll apparently know how to find him.
And find him she indeed does, sauntering right into a secret interrogation room and using her new superpowers to talk head honcho Noah (Colin Firth) into letting Daniel go. Daniel and Margaret now find themselves in a race against time to release his footage to the world before Noah catches up with them and kills them.
One gets the sense that if this were happening in real life, Noah would have killed Daniel, Jane and Margaret outright from the get-go. But this is Spielberg we’re talking about here, and even the mustache-twirling villain has a humane streak. Despite stomping around with a dozen agents armed with machine guns, Noah doesn’t truly want to kill anybody. He just doesn’t want people to know about aliens. He, like Jane, believes the world order depends on people not knowing aliens actually exist, even though it’s pretty obvious the world order is doing a fine job of breaking down all on its own.
“He went away again the second time, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.”
– Matthew 26:42 (KJV)
For her part, Margaret is meant to be the vessel through which the alien disclosure will be made. Once her backstory is revealed, it turns out to be no accident that she became a TV journalist. When Hugo finally introduces Margaret to his team, they greet her with reverent eyes. A member of Hugo’s team greets Margaret by crossing herself and bowing, to which Margaret quickly backs up and replies “Do not make me your religion.” This panic is compounded when she discovers they’ve reconstructed her childhood home in an attempt to help her recover some specific repressed childhood memories. She’s been ordained with some divine purpose, and we soon find out why.
As children, Daniel and Margaret were both abducted and studied by aliens, both coming away from the ordeal with newly acquired abilities. For Daniel, it’s being able to understand complex equations and alien languages and interpret them into fluid English; for Margaret, it’s being able to communicate in any language and read people through a simple look.
The aliens have made these two into the ultimate empaths, able to understand and communicate with anyone at a granular level. It’s not unlike the trick pulled by the aliens in Denis Villenueve’s Arrival, helping Amy Adams to understand their own language, and in effect figuring out time travel in order to save the world from the brink of destruction2. Daniel can now speak the aliens’ language, and Margaret can interpret for him, disclosing their lessons to the entire world using her position as a broadcast journalist.
This is where the movie’s real magic trick comes into play. One of Spielberg’s signatures has been his ‘look of wonder’ shot, often referred to as “The Spielberg Face”. It’s a close-up shot of a character looking on in wonder (or horror, as the situation demands) at something offscreen. Think of the dolly zoom on Chief Brody’s face in Jaws when he witnesses the shark eating Alex Kintner; or in Jurassic Park when Dr. Grant gets his first glimpse of living dinosaurs; or in Raiders when Indiana Jones first sees the giant boulder tumbling towards him; or in Raiders when he finally discovers the ark’s resting place; or in Raiders when Belloq witnesses the power of the ark, right before… well, you know…3
In short, these shots capture the moment when our characters bear witness to the sublime. Movies, Spielberg reasons, can conjure anything we can dream of, but what’s more important is communicating how those encounters make us feel. In Disclosure Day, the physical act of looking becomes a lifeline, a connection made to our collective humanity. Margaret’s ability to see through people and connect with their internal struggle is the ultimate act of empathy, and it’s eventually what Spielberg hopes will save humanity. And for her part, Emily Blunt is the perfect conduit for this; her big, sullen eyes convey a lifetime of empathy, sadness, and wonder. The entire movie rests on those sad eyes of hers, so much so that they put it on the poster.
If anything truly marks Disclosure Day as a film made by an 80-year-old man, it’s the fact that the film’s big climax finds everyone converging on Margaret’s TV station in Kansas City, where she’s able to convince her boss to let her broadcast all these videos of alien life forms, and everyone up the chain of command just… goes along with it. But more than that, people the world over are glued to their TVs and smartphones, just sitting around watching the nightly news. Teenagers on subway trains watch footage of alien experiments while holding their smartphones in portrait mode, and not a single one of them glances up to see if anyone else is watching this. They don’t need to, because everyone is watching this. It’s suddenly the one thing that actually manages to pre-empt World War III. And in that moment, the world is seemingly saved from certain doom.
Do I believe that could actually happen? No, not really. But God, would I love to. Part of the reason why I’m still deep in the tank for Steven Spielberg after all these years is that I wish with every fiber of my being that I could be as optimistic and hopeful as he is. I’m freely willing to admit that much of my worldview, my thoughts about the convergence of aliens and religion, belief in something beyond this world, is deeply rooted in seeing Close Encounters at a very early age. That movie imprinted on me in ways I’m still discovering. And with this movie? I’m learning that these things still have an effect on me as I enter middle age. Disclosure Day, ultimately, becomes an escape into a fantasy where amazing things are still real, basic decency can still win out, and the world outside my own head isn’t quite so scary. It sure as hell beats the alternative.
FINAL RATING
4.5 stars (out of 5). It’s so dang good, y’all.
- And I can’t help but point out that Steven Spielberg is also 80 years old.
↩︎ - Disclosure Day could only have been made after Arrival, ten years removed from the political moment of 2016.
↩︎ - Even as early as 1981, Spielberg had become so synonymous with this look that he made an entire movie about how looking isn’t always a wondrous thing. Indy and Marion only survive because they preserve their sense of wonder and actively don’t look. ↩︎
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