Editor’s note: Slight spoilers for Disclosure Day.
Steven Spielberg’s new film Disclosure Day is built around a premise that should feel familiar to anyone who’s spent time in the more conspiratorial corners of the internet: the U.S. government has known about alien life for 80 years and has been actively hiding it, not because the truth is dangerous in some practical sense, but because officials believe humanity isn’t spiritually equipped to handle it.
It’s an unusual hook for a summer thriller, and it’s an even more unusual choice for Spielberg to hang an entire film on faith without flinching away from it.
The fear driving the cover-up isn’t presented as political or military. It’s theological. The people guarding the secret believe that confirming alien life will do one of two things to the public: either turn aliens into objects of worship, or wreck whatever religious belief people still have left. A former novitiate nun, played by Eve Hewson, voices the second fear directly: “People will see them as deities. They’ll stop believing in God.” Another nun isn’t convinced. Her response is the kind of question that sounds simple until you actually sit with it: “Why would God make such a vast universe, yet save it only for us?”
That exchange sets up the whole film, and it’s worth saying clearly: this isn’t a debate Spielberg invented for dramatic effect. It’s one Christians, theologians and curious skeptics have been having quietly — sometimes not so quietly — for decades. What does the possibility of life beyond Earth actually mean for faith? Does a universe that big make God feel smaller, or does it make the claim of a personal God more audacious?
The two central characters end up functioning almost like prophets. Emily Blunt plays Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City weather anchor who suddenly starts speaking in unfamiliar languages, and Josh O’Connor plays Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity expert trying to force the truth into the open. Both become conduits for something neither of them controls. Margaret describes the experience as being a passenger rather than a driver, going wherever the current takes her, and there’s something in that surrender that resonates with anyone who has ever giving yourself over to something bigger than your own plans.
But the film is careful not to let that idea curdle into something it isn’t. When a Catholic character kneels and crosses himself in front of Margaret, she pulls back immediately: “No! I will not be anyone’s religion!” It’s a brief moment, but it’s doing real work. Spielberg isn’t suggesting his alien intelligence is God, or that Margaret is some kind of messiah. He’s drawing on religious imagery to ask a religious question, not to replace the answer.
And the imagery runs deep. The film leans hard on seemingly Exodus, of all things. The villain, a tech executive named Noah Scanlon played by Colin Firth, functions as a Pharaoh figure, presiding over an empire built on withheld truth. Margaret and Daniel are pushed toward a kind of Red Sea moment, the public unveiling that gives the film its title. There’s even a hailstorm. None of it is subtle, but none of it feels cheap either. Spielberg doesn’t lean on Biblical imagery to poke fun at religion. Rather, he treats it with the gravitas and the nuance faith deserves but rarely gets in mainstream movies.
I won’t spoil which side of the debate the film lands on, but I will spoil the film’s final word, spoken in the moment of disclosure itself: “listen.” It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of detail that suggests Spielberg knows exactly what he’s doing. A God, or a God-like force, who wants to be heard rather than hidden, who reveals rather than withholds. For a film this loaded with apocalyptic and Exodus imagery, that closing note feels like a punch to the gut in the best way.
Some of that intentionality likely traces back to Spielberg himself. Faith has run through his work for decades, sometimes quietly and sometimes directly, from the reverence shown to the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark to the unflinching weight of Jewish identity in Schindler’s List. Disclosure Day feels like something slightly different from either of those: instead of coming into the film with a clear conviction or answer, it appears as if Spielberg himself is wrestling with the truth as the film progresses. He just happens to use a summer blockbuster to do it.