Aliens, humanity, and God: In Disclosure Day, Spielberg still wants to believe

The upshot is that Spielberg still wants to trust the divine mysteries of the Universe, and he wants to trust humanity to embrace empathy and solidarity—but he does not trust powerful men, organizational secretiveness, or, a fortiori, the military–industrial complex. He believes we need sunlight—truth and transparency—which is to say we need whistleblowers and a free press. Yet in a world in which the powerful are sufficiently determined to silence the media, can sunlight still prevail? It might take a miracle. (Note to the spoiler-averse: I don’t think the pleasures of this movie especially depend on surprise, but if you want to stay unspoiled, stop reading now. Those who are truly spoilerphobic, I assume, saw the movie before they started reading.)

Josh O’Connor, who played the ingenuous Catholic priest in the Knives Out threequel Wake Up Dead Man, plays a different sort of priestly figure. An elite cybersecurity engineer, Daniel Kellner is a guardian of digital mysteries for a shadowy NGO with government ties—at least, until he undergoes a sort of conversion, and receives a subversive new calling to help bring revolutionary good news to the world. This good news is the long-suppressed truth that We Are Not Alone, and it’s tragically inseparable from bad news about who we are as a species.

Along with the priest, there’s also a prophet: Emily Blunt’s Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City TV meteorologist who feels driven to seek something more, and who receives her true calling in an unexpected way. There is possibly a hint of Eden, of the primordial harmony between Adam and the rest of creation, unexpectedly followed by a very definite Tower of Babel moment with a promise of Pentecost, of the undoing of Babel with universal understanding. With the world apparently tottering on the brink of a third World War, or an Armageddon, a lot hangs in the balance. If there’s a king to go with the prophet and the priest, he isn’t revealed until the end.

My religious typology is not gratuitous. Subtext becomes text, to begin with, when Daniel and his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), on the run from powerful pursuers, take refuge in a monastery of nuns where Jane reveals she was once a novice before, in her words, “I lost my calling.” (She says she was “a novitiate,” a colloquial usage preferred in movies, I guess because it sounds more exotic than “novice.”) The monastery is named for St. Clare (“St. Clare of the Dawn”), a saint whose legend includes—as explicitly noted the main antagonist, a kind of alien-secrets czar named Noah (Colin Firth)—miraculously experiencing a Christmas Eve Mass taking place miles away. Noah mentions this because he has technology that gives him a kind of bilocation, but Clare’s remote-viewing experience was also the grounds for Pope Pius XII in 1958 naming her the patroness of television, and that turns out to be her real significance here.

Jane’s lost calling, and her struggle of faith, lead to an exchange in which Jane challenges the wisdom of confronting humanity with an immense revelation altering our understanding of the universe and our place in it. She fears this will lead to panic and chaos at a globally vulnerable moment; she even fears that people will “stop believing in God”—belief in God being, in Jane’s view, part of the glue that holds societies together.

Absent the God talk, this is essentially Noah’s view as well. Sartorial choices aside, Noah and his fellow enforcers are the Men in Black (the Bible would call them, disparagingly, “princes”), highhandedly preserving human ignorance of extraterrestrials for what they deem the greater good. Noah’s name appears to offer, alas, no very clear allusion to Genesis; his nemesis, the mysterious Hugo (Colman Domingo), is namesake to Hugo Gernsback, the celebrated science-fiction writer and publisher for whom the Hugo Awards are named. (Gernsback’s sci-fi outlook was fundamentally optimistic, not unlike Spielberg’s own, and in marked contrast to Noah’s perspective.) Look, not everything is religion.

Not everything is religion, but religion is potentially everything, or at least everything may be touched by religious significance. Blunt’s Margaret knows things without knowing how, like the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters, Roy Neary, who saw Devil’s Tower in his head (and on his dinner plate, and in his living room) without knowing what it was. (Margaret’s bewildered boyfriend, an affable Wyatt Russell, is no more prepared to cope with this than Roy’s wife, played by Teri Garr.) It’s like Elizabeth is plugged into a higher power; the extraterrestrials are not divine beings, but they are “closer to God than you or I,” Hugo tells Noah.

Some believers resist metaphorical language conflating the Universe with God, creation with the Creator, on the grounds that orthodox Christianity is not pantheistic. Others view the possibility of nonhuman intelligences with suspicion. (Just last week a prominent Catholic exorcist was removed from exorcism duties after stating his belief that demons are responsible for “many, if not most” UFO sightings.) If the heavens proclaim the glory of God, and still more if intelligent beings other than ourselves are capable of religious insight, then listening to the Universe can be a way of listening for the voice of God. Spielberg wants us to listen, to not be afraid of what we don’t know. (I mean, he literally says so.) Fear of outsiders (of aliens), secretive internment camps, and mistreatment of detainees are among elements that speak to the present cultural moment.

I see I haven’t even gotten to the crucifix, the quasi-possession, and the quasi-stigmata. There’s a lot going on, considering this is a movie significantly driven by vehicular chases, bonkers set pieces, superpowers, and ridiculous movie escapes, not to mention numinous encounters with animals, hoary conspiracy theories, and Spielbergian childhood nostalgia and trauma, as well as, ultimately, Spielbergian awe. (The classic Spielberg Face image of people looking up in wonder gets a striking contemporary counterpoint here.)

It’s not hard to pick apart Disclosure Day if you want to. The screenplay, scripted from Spielberg’s original story by frequent collaborator David Koepp, is lean and well-crafted, but sometimes half-baked. Characterizations and relationships are barely sketched, and plot holes are big enough to drive a firetruck through. The humanistic vibe is strong enough almost to make you overlook the fact that a major plot device involves basically overriding people’s free will. The dialogue is sometimes on the nose, and big themes and questions are glibly wrapped up. (Not only does brief exchange with Elizabeth Marvel’s kind, savvy mother superior suffice to resolve concerns about aliens and God, difficult questions about the harmful effects of divisive, polarizing forms of religion are never even raised.) Weirdly, more than three decades after Jurassic Park dinosaurs that hold up today, we can still be taken out of a scene by an unconvincing CGI cardinal.

What holds Disclosure Day together despite its vulnerabilities are Spielberg’s heartfelt conviction, magisterial control, and expansive, immersive technique, along with the performances—particularly Blunt, struggling to cope with her rapidly expanding horizons, and grizzle-bearded Firth, more compromised and hollowed out than overtly malevolent. Spielberg and his regular cinematographer Janusz Kamiński keep us constantly in motion, every frame a reveal, a new revelation. I’m glad I saw it in IMAX.

Like The X-Files’s Fox Mulder, Spielberg wants to believe: in aliens, perhaps; in God, probably; in his fellow human being, definitely. In Disclosure Day, these longings are not discrete; they overlap almost to the point of identification. In our dark times, it’s an earnest invitation to watch expectantly for the coming dawn.