Spielberg's Aliens Were Never About Aliens
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- Steven Spielberg has spent decades keeping aliens at arm's length across films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and The War of the Worlds, showing them mostly in silhouette or brief glimpses rather than full reveal.
- Disclosure Day, Spielberg's first summer blockbuster in nearly 20 years, hinges on a whistleblower releasing government UFO evidence but keeps its gray aliens on the story's fringes, revealing them in the flesh only in the film's final minutes.
- Spielberg's aliens function as intellectual superiors and moral compasses that drive thought experiments about humanity, in contrast to his other creature features like Jurassic Park's dinosaurs and Jaws's shark, which center on the question of control.
- David Koepp co-wrote the screenplays for both War of the Worlds and Disclosure Day, connecting the two films in Spielberg's ongoing alien-as-metaphor project.
- In War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise's character Ray — a divorced father who forgets his daughter Rachel's peanut allergy — comes to understand the Martians well enough to protect his family, with the invasion serving as a metaphor for his reluctance about fatherhood.
- Disclosure Day positions aliens as teachers pushing humans to consider how empathy, memory, and faith can be overlooked in the face of overwhelming realities like world wars.
- Spielberg originally resisted incorporating aliens into Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, per his own behind-the-scenes comments, only warming to the idea once George Lucas suggested portraying them as members of a revered ancient civilization.
Why it matters: Disclosure Day is Spielberg's first summer blockbuster in nearly 20 years and the most recent articulation of a thesis he has refined across decades: that the idea of aliens, more than the aliens themselves, can push humans toward greater empathy and imagination. For audiences, the film reframes a familiar sci-fi premise as a meditation on what humanity overlooks when faced with the extraordinary.
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