Steven Spielberg is going back to sci fi. Disclosure Day opens June 12, and it is his first film about aliens since War of the Worlds in 2005. That was over twenty years ago. Two full decades where the guy who essentially invented the modern alien movie with Close Encounters and E.T. just decided to do other things. Now he is back in that territory, and I could not be more curious about what a 79 year old Spielberg thinks about first contact.
Emily Blunt plays a meteorologist whose on air breakdown becomes the first visible crack in something much larger. That is a great hook. Not a general receiving classified intel, not a scientist detecting a signal. A weather reporter losing it on live television because she has seen something she cannot explain. It is the kind of premise that sounds like vintage Spielberg, taking the extraordinary and filtering it through someone ordinary.
David Koepp wrote the screenplay, which is notable because Koepp also wrote Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, and the first Mission: Impossible for Spielberg and De Palma. The guy knows how to structure a spectacle around human stakes. And John Williams composed the score, marking his thirtieth collaboration with Spielberg. Thirtieth. That partnership has been producing some of the most iconic film music in history since 1974, and the fact that Williams is still composing at this stage of his career makes every new score feel like a gift.
The cast around Blunt is stacked. Josh O Connor, who most people know from The Crown but who has been doing increasingly interesting work since then. Colin Firth. Colman Domingo, who has become one of those actors where his name on a call sheet just makes the whole project feel more credible. Spielberg has always had a talent for assembling ensembles that feel like they belong together, and this group has a real texture to it.
Spielberg turns 80 this year. He is still making the kinds of movies that other directors spend their entire careers wishing they could pull off. There is something almost defiant about it, choosing to make an original sci fi epic at an age when most filmmakers have long since stopped taking swings. He could coast on legacy. Instead he is out here making first contact movies with John Williams scores and stacked casts. I do not know what Disclosure Day will be, but I know I will be in a theater on June 12.
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