Disclosure Day: Spielberg and the Return of Friendly Aliens

Every so often, the universe does your podcast scheduling for you.

Just as we’re getting ready to begin our next main-feed series, We Come in Peace ! A journey through the history of friendly aliens in sci-fi cinema, Steven Spielberg has only gone and released a brand new alien film.

Thanks, Steven. Very thoughtful.

HEAR THE FULL EPISODE HERE

Disclosure Day sees Spielberg returning to the skies, and for us that makes it a fascinating little bridge into the next stage of the Journey Through Sci-Fi. Because this is not just another alien film. It is Spielberg going back to one of the great obsessions of his career: visitors from elsewhere, human beings staring at the impossible, and the question of what contact with alien life might reveal about us.

Spielberg’s name is almost impossible to separate from the friendly alien movie. Close Encounters of the Third Kind helped define the idea of alien contact as something mysterious, emotional and almost spiritual. E.T. turned the alien visitor into one of cinema’s great figures of childhood empathy. Even when Spielberg has gone darker with sci-fi, there is often still that feeling of awe: the sense that something vast is pressing against ordinary human life.

But Disclosure Day feels like a different kind of first-contact story.

This is not really a slow, dreamy film about people waiting for lights in the sky. It is more like a conspiracy thriller with aliens at the centre of it. There are chases, cover-ups, shadowy organisations, secret information, big screens full of data, and characters trying to get the truth out before it is buried forever.

In our Patreon episode, Matt makes the point that you could almost replace the aliens with any world-changing piece of hidden information. In that sense, Disclosure Day becomes less about making contact and more about communication itself: who controls information, who gets to decide what the public can handle, and what happens when the truth finally breaks through.

That makes it feel very much like a first-contact film for the misinformation age.

Where Close Encounters asked, “what if the government is hiding something?”, Disclosure Day feels like it starts from a more modern place: “what if everyone already assumes everything is being hidden?”

It is also, very much, a Spielberg film. There are moments of pure cinematic craft here: action sequences that made us sit up in the cinema, a John Williams score that feels like it is echoing decades of Spielberg collaborations, and a few images that seem to pull from the long history of UFO stories, childhood memory and old-school alien mythology.

John Williams returning is especially lovely. Disclosure Day marks the 30th collaboration between Spielberg and Williams, a partnership that has shaped the sound of modern blockbuster cinema for more than 50 years. And you can feel that history in the film: a little Close Encounters, a little Indiana Jones, a little E.T., and even, to our ears, a hint of The X-Files creeping around the edges.

The film also gives Emily Blunt a very strange challenge. As Margaret, a meteorologist drawn into the alien mystery, she has to become a kind of human receiver for something non-human. One of the more interesting behind-the-scenes details is that Blunt reportedly chose to create the alien vocal sounds herself rather than rely on AI. That feels weirdly perfect for a film about communication, technology and human connection: the alien voice is still, in the end, coming from a human body.

Not everything works for us. In the episode, we talk about whether the characters are slightly underserved by the film’s relentless pace, whether some of the mystery-box elements are more satisfying than others, and whether the CGI animals are meant to look uncanny or are just… well, CGI animals.

We also get into the bigger ideas: faith, disclosure, empathy, government secrecy, who gets to decide what people can cope with, and whether alien contact would bring humanity together or just give us one more thing to argue about.

Because that might be the most interesting thing about Disclosure Day. For all its alien mythology and thriller mechanics, it is ultimately a film about whether human beings are still capable of listening to each other.

Which makes it a perfect launchpad for We Come in Peace. In that upcoming series, we’ll be looking back through sci-fi cinema at aliens who don’t simply arrive to invade or destroy. Sometimes they come to warn us. Sometimes they come to help us. Sometimes they come to confuse us. And sometimes they arrive just to show humanity something about itself.

So before we begin that journey properly, we’ve recorded a Patreon bonus episode on Disclosure Day, getting into spoilers, Spielberg’s alien legacy, the film’s ideas, its action, its ending, and where it sits alongside films like Close Encounters, E.T., Arrival and more.

The full Disclosure Day episode is available now on Patreon.

And if you want first word on what we’re covering next, plus recommendations and discoveries from sci-fi history, you can also sign up to our free newsletter, The JTSF Logbook.

Keep watching the skies.

We’ll be back soon with We Come in Peace.