Disclosure Day is great. But Spielberg overestimates our capacity for empathy

Spielberg’s sci-fi blockbuster starring Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor may be spectacular, but it misjudges how much abuse of groups we see as ‘other’ humans are prepared to tolerate

S teven Spielberg has converted his longstanding fascination with the possible existence of aliens into considerable commercial and critical success and now, 49 years after Close Encounters and 44 after ET, the film-maker has returned to the subject for the sci-fi spectacular Disclosure Day.

The film follows cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) and weather presenter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) as they become state-secret whistleblowers, working with Hugo (Colman Domingo) to expose nearly eight decades’ worth of evidence that the US government has known about extraterrestrial life.

The files are stolen from Wardex, a shady organisation run by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) where Daniel and Hugo used to work, including video footage that shows US organisations not just meeting alien life forms but exploiting, vivisecting and killing them too.

When this footage is shown to Daniel’s girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), with the warning that it’s “hard to watch”, it brings her to immediate tears, and provokes in this former novitiate almost as immediate crises of conscience and faith. And there is a similar reaction on a wider scale later in the film, when traffic is brought to a standstill by footage that a newscaster later apologises for streaming without warning.

Yet such evidence isn’t a world away from the sort of footage we already see, whether it be of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor , the people dying every day in Palestine, or those men, women and children detained in brutal conditions in US detention centres.

So forgive me if scenes of shock over the mistreatment of aliens don’t ring entirely accurate.

Othered groups have long faced abuse and discrimination at both state and social levels, been feared, misunderstood and used as scapegoats to explain declining standards of living. Unanimous worldwide outrage about this is notable for its absence.