Steven Spielberg has been making movies about aliens and UFOs for a long time. His first amateur film, an essentially lost film titled Firelight he made when he was 17, was about close encounters. A decade after that, he made Close Encounters. His newest film, Disclosure Day, returns to one of his favorite topics for the first time in nearly 20 years. But while aliens still may be as fascinating as ever, a lot has changed here on Earth, and Disclosure Day is in turn quite different from most of Spielberg’s past efforts. Disclosure Day may be achingly, naively optimistic about humanity, but it also depicts shadowy conspiracies with a greater sense of cynicism than the filmmaker’s ever done before.
In Disclosure Day, Josh O’Connor plays Daniel Kellner, a tech-guy-turned-whistleblower at Wardex, a company that’s kept the secret of alien life from the public for more than 70 years. When he and his fellow conspirators steal an extraterrestrial device, alongside evidence of America’s decades of UFO encounters and grotesque experiments on captured aliens, Wardex’s head honcho Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) stops at nothing to recover the information and keep the truth hidden.
Shadowy organizations who want to control the UFO narrative are big parts of three of Spielberg’s previous alien movies. (His 2005 War Of The Worlds is the exception, as the Martians’ sudden all-out attack on Earth means there was never any conspiracy to keep secret.) Yet even though the legion of men in hazmat suits who invade Elliott’s home in E.T. are scary, and even though the scientists have the U.S. Army fake a toxic nerve gas spill to get everyone away from the site of their secret UFO landing site in Close Encounters, the organizations aren’t ultimately antagonistic. The government goons in E.T. are presumably doing their due diligence as they deal with an unprecedented event, and Peter Coyote’s lead agent eventually reveals himself to be extremely sympathetic. In Close Encounters, the French scientist played by François Truffaut who heads the operation is empathetic and motivated by a sense of scientific wonder as mankind makes first contact with beings from another world. The FBI aren’t exactly a bunch of sweeties when it comes to covering up Roswell in Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, but Spielberg’s least-liked UFO movie is also his pulpiest; Crystal Skull is understandably less interested in conspiracy and more in adventure.
Compare the antagonists of Close Encounters and E.T. to Disclosure Day‘s Wardex. A private organization with military contracts that has long-since decided what they were doing was too important to involve the president or any elected leaders in, Wardex’s primary goal is absolute secrecy while they exploit alien technology for financial gain. Scanlon has no sense of wonder as he uses an alien device to try to track down the stolen files; it’s much more mercenary. His agents are willing to kill if that’s what it takes to prevent the truth from getting out. It’s an ugly truth, too. The videos Kellner stole include graphic scenes of Wardex agents interrogating and torturing the captive aliens in their care or shoveling gory alien corpses without remorse. Sure E.T. died (temporarily) in the care of the government, but that was an accident. For Wardex, alien suffering seems to be part of the goal.
And while it’s not as though everyone at Wardex is an entirely one-dimensional villain—Scanlon makes some compelling points about the potential danger of revealing the existence of aliens to an unprepared world, Scanlon’s revealed to have become colder after the death of his wife, and he does eventually let the truth come out rather than take drastic violent measures—it’s hard not to see them as a more sinister force than the shadowy groups from Spielberg’s earlier films.
Why is it that in 2026, Spielberg’s alien agency is so much more clearly a villain compared to his depictions of them from decades earlier? In an era of privatization and widespread distrust of institutions, it makes sense that the murky power would come from government scientists but a tech-savvy company seemingly pulling all the strings without public input. (The current state of American governance in the Trump era would also make a benevolent, competent, science-forward organization seem somewhat farfetched.) In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Spielberg was explicit about the difference between Close Encounters and Disclosure Day. “I really don’t believe that governments can keep secrets,” he said. “But big tech companies can. And there are contracting companies that I believe hold all the knowledge and have the archives, not governments.”
It’s ironic then—but almost certainly intentional—that Richard Nixon features in Disclosure Day, a movie that feels more post-Watergate than the ones Spielberg actually made in the immediate aftermath of Watergate. The first thing that Kellner shows his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) to let her in on the alien secret is footage of Tricky Dick showing off some alien corpses to a TV actor he wanted to impress. This incident is later cited as the turning point that prompted Wardex to take over alien secrecy as a private organization that went above future presidents’ heads. The government conspiracy in Close Encounters was clearly part of the post-Watergate sense of paranoia, but its ultimate organizational benevolence suggested Spielberg didn’t think things were quite so far gone. That’s not the case now. As screenwriter David Koepp put it in that same EW feature, “There was a sense that, ‘Hey, maybe our government might be lying to us.’ And now the sense is, ‘Hey, our government lies to us constantly. I wonder when, if ever, is there any truth?'”
Yet, if Wardex represents a level of cynicism that none of Spielberg’s other movies about an alien conspiracy reached, it’s countered by a level of well-intentioned but possibly misguided (and certainly Boomer-coded) optimism. The corrupt powers above are keeping secrets and don’t have our best interests at heart, but humanity can be trusted to do the right thing if these nefarious forces simply let us make our own choices. A TV news broadcast fixes everything, suggesting that Spielberg’s assessment of the state of journalism isn’t quite as on-point as his take on conspiracy-courting organizations. If he’s lost faith in the latter in the decades since Close Encounters, he’s somehow gained it in the former since making The Post. That hopeful belief might be unrealistic, but it makes sense that Spielberg would lionize the people who are supposed to tell the truth at the same time he villainizes the secret-keepers more than he ever has before.
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