The Truth About Steven Spielberg’s Alien Obsession

This article contains spoilers for the film Disclosure Day.As much as Steven Spielberg likes aliens, he seems to prefer holding them at arm’s length. The creatures in Close Encounters of the Third Kind contact humans using music and lights, but the director offers only glimpses of them, mostly in silhouette. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial spends plenty of screen time depicting the titular character as a fish out of water; meanwhile, viewers never get to see the inside of E.T.’s spaceship. And in his adaptation of H. G. Wells’s classic sci-fi novel The War of the Worlds, the extraplanetary invaders stay largely hidden, preferring to observe humanity from behind their weaponry.Aliens are just as camera-shy in Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s newest ostensible examination of them. The movie hinges on a whistleblower releasing evidence of the government’s encounters with UFOs, yet it’s remarkably short on extraterrestrial spectacle. The gray aliens who arrived on Earth decades ago exist on the story’s fringes, masking themselves as wild animals and showing up in the flesh only in the film’s final minutes; they’re otherwise seen in grainy clips of scientists and military officials inspecting and interrogating them. Throughout, they’re spoken of with awe and depicted as both fearsome and vulnerable, all-knowing yet unknowable. Disclosure Day is Spielberg’s first summer blockbuster in nearly 20 years, but its enigmatic aliens turn the movie into a strange puzzle—the latest in a long line of attempts by the filmmaker to use them as tools for understanding humans.Spielberg’s instinct to show only glimpses of aliens hasn’t always been intentional. Sometimes, he’s obscured the extraterrestrials due to the limitations of movie magic. Like the shark in Jaws, the aliens of Close Encounters couldn’t quite achieve what the script called for: The wire work involved in making them fly around their mothership proved too frustrating to pull off. Yet the director seems to rely on extraplanetary