Steven Spielberg has converted his longstanding fascination with the possible existence of aliens into considerable commercial and critical success. Now, 49 years after Close Encounters and 44 after ET, the filmmaker has returned to the subject for the sci-fi spectacular Disclosure Day.
The Plot of Disclosure Day
The film follows cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) and weather presenter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) as they become state-secret whistleblowers. They work with Hugo (Colman Domingo) to expose nearly eight decades' worth of evidence that the US government has known about extraterrestrial life. The files are stolen from Wardex, a shady organization run by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), where Daniel and Hugo used to work. The evidence includes video footage showing US organizations not just meeting alien life forms but exploiting, vivisecting, and killing them too.
When this footage is shown to Daniel's girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), with the warning that it's "hard to watch," it brings her to immediate tears and provokes in this former novitiate almost immediate crises of conscience and faith. A similar reaction occurs on a wider scale later in the film, when traffic is brought to a standstill by footage that a newscaster later apologizes for streaming without warning.
A Questionable Premise
Yet such evidence isn't a world away from the sort of footage we already see, whether it be of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the people dying every day in Palestine, or those men, women, and children detained in brutal conditions in US detention centers. So forgive me if scenes of shock over the mistreatment of aliens don't ring entirely accurate.
Othered groups have long faced abuse and discrimination at both state and social levels, been feared, misunderstood, and used as scapegoats to explain declining standards of living. Unanimous worldwide outrage about this is notable for its absence. So what makes aliens any different? There would surely be justifications of barbaric experimentation in the name of national security, and an acceptance that it's better to test on aliens than humans. We already do the same to animals, who bear the brunt of cosmetic and scientific experiments in many areas of the world.
Aliens as Animals
Strikingly, extraterrestrials show up in the form of animals in Disclosure Day, including moose, cardinals, foxes, and deer. These are familiar shapes, and therefore less threatening to humans, and are arguably cuter than the long-limbed, bug-eyed, grey-hued look we've come to assign to aliens. Some studies have shown that we're more concerned by animal abuse than human abuse (although babies did come top of the list in a 2017 study by the Animals & Society Institute). But while campaigners against industrial farming in Denmark are putting animals as high as humans on the political manifesto, and Alabama homeowners protest a proposed cull of geese, is it really feasible that the world would respond to creatures from the cosmos with the same curiosity and compassion, rather than fear?
A Stellar Film with a Flawed Core
Disclosure Day is not a documentary, despite the film's suggestion that modern presidents have been taken out of the loop of alien updates – an eerie echo of Barack Obama's recent podcast furore. As far as we know, there is no evidence of alien life appearing to humans as animals, or imbuing a chosen few with the power to communicate with these visitors from across the galaxy. Colin Firth is not hoarding state secrets and Emily Blunt is not an intergalactic sleeper agent. But for an otherwise stellar cinematic experience, I couldn't shake my disbelief.
This is not a film with an overt moral message. It asks questions, particularly about how religion governs social good, and whether a belief in Mary, mother of Jesus, can coexist with meeting Martians. Spielberg does not lay this on with a particularly didactic hand. Yet for all its subtlety and entertainment, Disclosure Day's central assumption seems to stem from a world entirely unlike the one most people experience each day.
