Spielberg really loves his aliens, doesn’t he?
Disclosure Day comes out today, and this is the fourth time this man has sat behind a camera and said, “Okay, but what if something came down from the sky.” You’d think by now alien movies would be his shtick. But here’s what’s strange — each one is so completely different from the others that you find yourself wondering how anyone can make four movies about the same subject and have none of them feel like they’re about the same thing.
I would actually argue that they’re not really about aliens at all. Let me walk you through it.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Close Encounters of the Third Kind is about obsession. Richard Dreyfuss sees a UFO and it breaks something in his brain. He can’t let it go. He starts sculpting Devil’s Tower out of his mashed potatoes at dinner while his family stares at him. His wife leaves. His kids think dad has completely lost it.
And honestly? Dad has completely lost it. The aliens are barely in the movie. They show up at the end for five minutes and play some music. The rest of it is just a man destroying his own life because he saw something beautiful and can’t stop chasing it. That’s not a sci-fi movie. That’s a movie about what happens when something touches you so deeply that the people around you can’t follow you there anymore.
E.T. the Extra Terrestrial
E.T. is about loneliness. You know the story — a kid from a broken home finds a lost alien, they become best friends, the government wants to dissect it, the kid saves it with his bicycle and the power of not wanting to be alone anymore. But think about why it works so well. Elliott isn’t looking for an adventure. He’s looking for someone — anyone — in that house to notice he exists. His dad left. His mom is overwhelmed. His brother thinks he’s annoying. And then this weird little creature shows up who is also lost, also scared, also far from home. They don’t speak the same language. They don’t need to. They recognize the same feeling. That’s the whole movie. Two lonely beings finding each other, and a ten-year-old willing to fight the entire United States government to keep his one friend alive.
War of the Worlds
War of the Worlds is about failure. And this is the one that doesn’t get enough credit, honestly. Tom Cruise plays a divorced dad who is bad at being a dad. Not in a funny movie way, but in a real way. He doesn’t know what his kids eat. He can’t talk to his teenage son. His daughter looks at him like she’s waiting for him to disappoint her again. Then aliens invade and he has to keep them both alive, and the whole movie becomes about a man realizing, while running from tripods, that he has not earned the right to be the person these kids depend on. Every other alien invasion movie turns the dad into a hero. Spielberg made the dad the problem. The aliens are just the thing that forced him to finally show up.
Disclosure Day
And now Disclosure Day. I haven’t seen it yet, but from everything Spielberg has said and from the reviews coming in, this one is about truth. What happens when the proof exists and nobody believes it. What happens when the institutions that were supposed to protect us have spent decades making sure we couldn’t handle the answer. Spielberg told ABC News last week that he doesn’t even consider this one science fiction. He said, “I have a very strong, sticky suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth right now. And I made a movie about that.” He’s 79 years old and he said that with a straight face. Incredible.
So that’s the list. Obsession, loneliness, failure, truth. Four alien movies, four emotions, no repeats. Nobody else in the history of movies has done this. James Cameron made two great alien movies and they were both about the same thing (survival, but cooler the second time). Ridley Scott made one perfect alien movie and then spent twenty years trying to explain it until it stopped being scary. Spielberg just keeps pointing the camera at a different part of the human experience and using the aliens as the thing that cracks it open.
The man has been making movies for fifty years and he still has not run out of feelings to attach to a spaceship. Go see Disclosure Day tomorrow. In a theater. On a big screen. You deserve to feel something that isn’t your phone for two hours.
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