50 years before ‘Disclosure Day’, Steven Spielberg had a much more daring conclusion about aliens on Earth
Steven Spielberg has always been fascinated by how aliens would affect the lives of ordinary people.
In ET, he explored the kindness and openness of children and contrasted them with the fear and aggression of adults. In War of the Worlds, an admittedly poor film, he explored fatherhood and redemption. But the two movies that wrestle with the question the most directly are 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 2026’s Disclosure Day.
In both movies, regular Americans discover that they have a psychic connection with extraterrestrial visitors that they do not understand, and in both films, the authorities attempt to stop them from reaching a rendezvous with their alien interlocutors. But while Disclosure Day is too simplistic and idealistic to carry this scenario through to a satisfying conclusion, Close Encounters of the Third Kind provides an often uncomfortable illustration of how this otherworldly situation could upend a person’s psyche and tear apart their relationships with the people closest to them.
Spielberg himself wrote the script after several failed attempts from other writers. Set in the present day of 1977, it begins with a sandstorm in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, where a group of scientists are examining planes that mysteriously arrived in the night after disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle more than two decades before.
In Indiana, utility worker Roy (Richard Dreyfuss) is sent out in the middle of the night to fix a massive electrical outage, only to witness a flying saucer hovering over his truck. As the scientists zero in on the source of the reappearing objects, Roy and his fellow witnesses are drawn towards the answers in a more mysterious way.
Roy has a wife (Teri Garr) and three young children, who watch in horror as he becomes increasingly obsessed with what he saw. Not only is he cutting out newspaper clippings about UFOs, but he’s constantly compelled to make tall, lumpy shapes out of everyday materials. Shaving cream, mashed potatoes, and dirt all become variations on this mysterious structure, and he grows ever more manic and desperate as he tries to understand what it means.
These scenes are unsettling. Not only are we watching a man fall apart, but we are also watching how this derailment affects his family. In one scene, Roy frantically shapes a pile of mashed potatoes into a tower at the dinner table while his oldest son (Shawn Bishop) silently watches, tears running down his face. When Roy starts dismantling the neighbours’ duck enclosure and throwing bricks through the kitchen window, Ronnie (Garr) has finally had it, and after an explosive confrontation, she shepherds the kids into the station wagon and drives away.
Where most science fiction films use aliens or government agents to instil fear in their audiences, Close Encounters uses the dissolution of the family unit. Spielberg, who has been open over the years about the impact that his parents’ divorce had on him as a child, has also explored childhood loneliness and absent parents throughout his films, most notably in ET. It’s easy to imagine that these anguished scenes of a family falling apart in Close Encounters were at least emotionally autobiographical, and the raw horror of them becomes the central tension of the movie.
Even more startling is the fact that, once Ronnie drives away with the kids, Roy doesn’t seem to think of them again. Once they’re out of sight, he continues building his mysterious tower until he finally recognises what it signifies. The ending, in which Roy travels to a rendezvous point in Wyoming, seals his fate as an antihero. When given the opportunity to board the spaceship and leave his family forever, he barely hesitates.
“That was before I had kids,” Spielberg said of the ending in a 2005 interview.
“That was 1977. So I wrote that blithely. Today, I would never have the guy leaving his family and go on the mothership. I would have the guy doing everything he could to protect his children.”
Steven Spielberg
As a father, Spielberg couldn’t conceive of the idea that a parent might voluntarily abandon his family, but in 1977, as a child of divorce, such an ending was all too plausible. Perhaps that is why it still hits hard five decades later. Roy’s abandonment cuts right to the most painful fears of childhood, whether you experienced a parent’s desertion or not. Spielberg might not have made the same decision if he directed the movie today, but it was, consciously or not, the most provocative choice.
In contrast, Disclosure Day shies away from the darkness that the revelation of alien life would bring out in a person. Instead, Spielberg casts the government as the villains, and even they forfeit their malevolence eventually. According to this version of similar events, everything would be fine if the authorities just told the public everything they knew about the aliens. In fact, this type of revelation, the movie seems to argue, could save humanity from itself because it would call upon our innate stores of empathy and wonder.
Such a conclusion is profoundly optimistic, which is perhaps what we need in this shit show of 2026. But it’s also a bit thin. It raises countless “what about” questions that it doesn’t seem interested in answering, even if it could. On the other end of the spectrum, the ending of Close Encounters is bold and unequivocal while still leaving room for debate and mystery.
It is not a perfect movie. Spielberg probably should have taken a Jaws approach by only hinting at the aliens instead of showing them. But in terms of that central question of how an ordinary person might react if aliens began communicating with them, it offers a much more challenging and nuanced take that still feels dangerous and thought-provoking 50 years later.
