It’s a question that has fascinated science fiction film-makers and authors: just how would we react if aliens exist? And, if they do, should we even be told?
This big question dominates Steven Spielberg’s latest sci-fi epic, Disclosure Day, which sees Josh O’Connor playing a whistleblower determined to tell the world there’s been a vast cover-up, and that aliens do in fact exist.
It marks the fourth film of Spielberg’s that directly deals with aliens – following 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1982’s ET and 2005’s War of the Worlds – but is the first directly pulled from news headlines and one that presents a new, and original, perspective.
Spielberg conceived the story after reading the New York Times’ bombshell reporting in 2017 about a secret Pentagon UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena, the latest term for UFOs) programme, complete with videos from fighter jets of close encounters.
As with his other films, it would deal with the wonder and terror of alien contact, but also something subtler: less a first contact story, more a 70s-era political thriller. Think ET meets The Post. For O’Connor’s character Daniel Kellner, along with Emily Blunt’s weather reporter Margaret Fairchild, it’s as much a search for secrets buried deep within themselves. Screenwriter David Koepp says his touchstone was less sci-fi, more the 1975 classic thriller Three Days of the Condor.
“What did you steal?” asks Eve Hewson’s character at one point.
“Secrets,” replies O’Connor’s character Daniel, “that they paid me to protect.”
“Are they … people?” she asks.
“No,” he says.
It could hardly be more timely. In February, former president Barack Obama said aliens were real during a quickfire round of questioning on a podcast, before clarifying that he hadn’t seen any evidence. Later that month, Donald Trump said that he would release whatever information the government holds on the search for alien life.
Some sci-fi films have attempted to tackle the issue of how such a secret could be kept. After all, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse has put it: “Do you think the government is that competent that they can keep such a secret?”
Perhaps 1997’s Men in Black had the neatest solution for this, with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones simply using alien tech to erase the memory of people who’d seen too much. But that zapper also touched upon a reason why any alien contact would be hushed up. If any government possessed alien technology, they likely wouldn’t want anyone else to have it.
Disclosure Day tackles this head-on. Colin Firth plays Noah Scanlon, the head of a shadowy government contractor called Wardex, who is in possession of a piece of advanced tech simply known as “the device”, which allows the user to control the minds of others. In the trailer, we see Firth’s character able to project a hologram of himself anywhere he chooses, and even take control of other people’s bodies. Tech, it goes without saying, that would be handy in both spycraft and warfare, and so probably worth keeping quiet about.
But the question remains: are we ready? How would we cope with the momentous news that we’re not alone in the universe?
In HG Wells’ classic sci-fi novel The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, alien arrival prompts societal collapse as people flee from cities. Even when the aliens are kind, such as the squid-like creatures in the 2016 movie Arrival, they still find themselves on the wrong end of a bombing by a faction on Earth that’s worried they might not stay that way. In Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact, the existence of aliens sends religious groups into mass panic, forced to imagine a God that didn’t just create our planet, but potentially trillions of them.
As Tommy Lee Jones’s Agent K put it in Men in Black: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”
Disclosure Day’s story is set in the present day, but against a backdrop of a geopolitical crisis that risks a world war. The crisis is a fictitious one, but more than any other Spielberg sci-fi, it speaks to current concerns: about transparency, misinformation, and the abuse of technology. And just how prepared are we for such secrets to come out?
Firth’s Scanlon may seem like the villain of the piece, but as Firth himself has put it: “Scanlon presents as a villain, but as the story rolls forward, you see there are layers of complexity in his desire to protect the information he knows and in his belief that the world will spiral into chaos if certain truths were made known.”
History, after all, is littered with examples of new information about our place in the cosmos not going down well. In 1600, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition – one of his theories was that every star was a sun, complete with its own habitable planets.
As Spielberg himself recently said about the possibility of alien disclosure: “The X-Files taught us that the truth is out there, but what happens when we find it?”
Disclosure Day is in cinemas from Wednesday 10 June
