Let’s Talk About the Ending of Disclosure Day

Before Disclosure Day was finally unveiled to the public, some speculated that Steven Spielberg’s new alien film might be a secret sequel to his 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That turned out not to be true. Except that it wasn’t entirely wrong, either. Disclosure Day could easily be set in a world where the events of Close Encounters have also taken place and been suppressed. Both movies have similar narrative trajectories: A man and a woman from different walks of life get entangled in a paranoid pursuit involving evidence of aliens that the powers that be are trying to cover up. Everyone eventually converges on one location, where the forward momentum of the story stops and the aliens are finally revealed. In the case of Close Encounters, this happens at a base camp at Devils Tower, Wyoming, where a group of scientists (and a couple of intruders) has direct contact with an alien race. In the case of Disclosure Day, it’s a TV news studio in Kansas City where eight decades of alien evidence is broadcast to the entire world. (Among the footage, is that a brief glimpse of Devils Tower that we see?)

Before we get to the news studio, however, it’s worth looking into a major sequence that occurs beforehand, when Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) and Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) make their way to a warehouse where Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) and his colleagues have built a recreation of Margaret’s childhood home. There, Hugo hopes to have Margaret recover her lost memories of a suppressed childhood incident: As a ten-year old, she found herself in a fairy-tale house in the woods where she was given the powers that she’s demonstrated throughout the film. (These powers, we’re told, lay dormant in her for years until they were triggered by an incident early in the movie.) It was during this initial encounter that she first saw Daniel, who was also a terrified child, and who was also given his powers at this time. He, too, has suppressed this memory. Together, however, they can reclaim it. 

It’s kind of a classic alien abduction scenario, but the way Spielberg shoots this scene — half flashback, half cinematic astral projection — is fascinating, letting it waver uncomfortably from fantastical to dreamy to nightmarish to clinical. The memory begins with young Margaret sitting in her bed, singing “Someday my prince will come” from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (remember, Close Encounters referenced “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Pinocchio), and then being lured out into the snow by a quartet of animals. (These animals — a deer, a fox, a racoon, and a cardinal — admittedly have an eerie CGI smoothness to them, though perhaps they’re meant to look a little fake. Hugo says that the aliens appear as animals “to calm us.” But who on Earth would be calmed by a deer peering through their bedroom window?)

Young Margaret follows the creatures in the snow, through the woods, towards what is described as a “Hansel and Gretel house,” where she finds herself on an examination table. A deer appears to be looking at her intently. Then, the camera circles around the animal’s face and closes in on one of its eyes, revealing it to be something decidedly creepier: the eye of an extra-terrestrial, accompanied by those eerie clicking noises that we now know constitute their math-based language. Look at the brazen ease with which Spielberg switches tones throughout this scene: A fairy-tale moment becomes something terrifying, particularly when an alien’s spidery fingers wrap around young Margaret’s head. The mix of tones is certainly intentional, because Spielberg is in fact depicting a childhood trauma. (Earlier in the film, when Margaret was at the hospital with her boyfriend Jackson, there was brief mention of a traumatic event that happened when she was ten.) He wants to unsettle us. He wants this scene to be weird and off-putting. Because by allowing her to relive this memory, Hugo is helping Margaret to gain control of it. At the end of this scene, there is one final shot of the alien examination table, only this time Margaret is her adult self and no longer terrified: She has power over what happened to her.  Watching this scene, one might be reminded of The Fabelmans and how it depicted young Sammy Fabelman (a stand-in for Spielberg in that semi-autobiographical tale) trying to recreate the massive (and, to him, petrifying) train crash from The Greatest Show on Earth as a way of asserting his power over something that terrified him. (“That’s why he needs to watch them crash,” as his mom put it in that film. “He’s trying to get some kind of control over it.”)

To what end, though? Hugo tells Margaret and Daniel that they’ve both been given these dormant powers by the aliens so that they can, in tandem, communicate with the world through them. Daniel was turned into a math genius by his alien encounter. “They gave you fluency in the language in which the book of the universe is written,” as Hugo puts it, “so you can understand them.” And they gave Margaret empathy, he says, “so you can understand us.” I mentioned in my review that this division between Daniel the tech wiz and Margaret the empath mirrors the portrait of Spielberg’s parents as presented in The Fabelmans: the scientist and the artist, whose divorce so deeply affected their son and fueled the emotional energy in many of his films. Personally speaking, I find it ridiculously touching that in Disclosure Day Spielberg has given the task of translating the secrets of the cosmos to avatars of his own parents.

Spielberg is a UFO true believer and seems to have been for some time. For Close Encounters, he used the renowned ufologist J. Allen Hynek as a consultant, and E.T. was inspired partly by research into a notorious alleged alien encounter in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1955. The evidence that Daniel reveals to the world at the end of Disclosure Day — 79 years’ worth of film and video footage — isn’t just stuff Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp made up for the movie. The footage shown corresponds to real pieces of alien lore, from the alleged 1947 crash at Roswell, N.M. to the story that then-President Richard Nixon showed four recovered alien bodies to comedian Jackie Gleason in 1973.

As this material plays across the world’s TV screens, it’s narrated by a CNN anchor who is audibly moved by what she’s seeing. This seemingly thankless performance, by Courtney Grace, is quite crucial, and we should give the relatively unknown actress some credit. One of Spielberg’s gambits in Disclosure Day is to suggest that a world on the brink of nuclear war would actually be united and moved in the face of alien evidence, that the human race might — just might — witness this encounter with the strange and unknown and respond to it not with fear and rage and fragmentation and cynicism and violence, but with something resembling optimism and love. The anchor’s compassionate, slightly cracking voice must convey this idea, because at least during this scene, she is the human embodiment of that idea.

Spielberg’s fascination with aliens has never just been about extra-terrestrial visitors. If one looks at his filmography, most of his movies are period pieces. But his alien movies are always about the present: They don’t just take place in the present, they also reflect the mood of their times, from the post-Watergate paranoia of Close Encounters, to the adolescent anarchy of a broken home in E.T., to 9/11 and Iraq War overtones in War of the Worlds. Disclosure Day has that, too. All throughout, we see the ostensible villain, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), and his minions in control rooms, looking at walls of monitors as various assistants bark out real-time data about the people they’re pursuing: Who didn’t show up for work, who was seen where, who said what. Satellite coordinates. Social media videos. A.I. tracking models. Heat signatures. The world of Disclosure Day is one of total transparency, non-stop surveillance, endless pursuit. We can’t really call it paranoia anymore because we live in a world where people really are after us, and everyone can see what everyone else is doing. Daniel’s footage reverses all that. By presenting this alien evidence to the world and broadcasting it via every single TV channel and blasting it out to everyone’s phone, he takes the surveillance power of modern technology and turns it to his advantage. Maybe all this wouldn’t work in real life. Maybe we’re all too fragmented to give a shit about any of this. Some have noted that some alien evidence has been declassified recently and barely made a ripple. Maybe, even if aliens do arrive, we’ll just continue screaming at each other and trying to kill each other, extra-terrestrials be damned. But Steven Spielberg can still hope, because that’s sort of what he does.

The aliens shown in Disclosure Day are not newfangled creations designed to look as strange and cool as possible. Instead, they’re adorably old fashioned, slightly more realistic versions of the kind you might have seen in 1950s B-movies. At the very end, Hugo carts in an actual alien: “In Vivo 17,” who it is suggested during an earlier exchange has willed this whole operation into being, on some level. Now seemingly old and frail (though, interestingly, enormous), In Vivo 17 is a classic alien design, with a big head and huge black bug eyes and long, spindly fingers. Consider this: In the year 2026, Steven Spielberg probably could have had any number of hot-shot visual effects wizards create some totally weird extra-terrestrial creature for the big reveal at the end of his $125 million sci-fi opus. But he’s not trying to blow our minds here. Because if all these UFO stories that have been rumored and speculated about over the decades are in fact true, then the aliens should look roughly like the ones that regularly haunted the 20th century’s dreams.

In the film’s very last scene, In Vivo whispers something to Daniel and Margaret. Daniel then whispers something to Margaret, presumably translating what In Vivo said for her. Then, Margaret steps before the TV cameras and utters one word: “Listen…” Whereupon the movie ends. Roll credits! What??!? It’s unclear, of course, if that “Listen” is meant to be the beginning of a longer statement that we don’t get to hear. (“Listen, there’s a whole army of aliens about to land on Earth. Do not resist.” Or: “Listen, we come in peace.” Or: “Listen, we wanted to colonize you but then we noticed we hate water.” Or: “Listen, we wanted to invite you to join our Galactic Federation but then we realized you humans sort of suck.”) Maybe that “Listen” is in fact the entire message: Listen to each other, listen to yourselves, listen to the world. We’ll never really know. Because for all his belief in UFOs, this movie, more than anything, is a 79-year-old man demonstrating his belief in humanity. It might sound corny and idealistic, sure. That’s because it is. But if you’re inclined to agree with him, it also happens to be quite moving. And if you’re inclined not to agree with him, then it should be even more moving — because it will remind you of the humanity that we’ve lost.