Sammy Fabelman sits in darkness, threading strips of footage from a family camping trip through a projector. Ambrosial memories—the lightness and laughter of his sisters play-fighting with sticks in the foreground; the glimmer of his mother Mitzi and family friend Bennie behind them. The girls pull the focus, but there’s a different story through the trees. A story that already tells its ending. Mitzi’s private inner world—a subtle but objective display of intimacy with her husband’s best friend—reveals itself to her son, who smells blood in his family’s water as he watches more reels, collects more evidence; observing what his camera noticed before he did.
Moving pictures have always been Steven Spielberg’s primary way of observing and understanding the world. The Fabelmans (2022), the autobiographical story of his burgeoning love for film and the love affair that unraveled his family, is a fascinating inward look at one of our most iconic and prolific storytellers. Spielberg films are always personal, but the lens distorts exact reality—it glides in his trademark style, like air and nothing more, picking up signals along the way. But is the personal intentional here, or the byproduct of a boundlessly creative, hungry, and variegated career?
It was only later, at the suggestion of James Lipton, that Spielberg realized his 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind mimics the story of his family. His father, a computer scientist, and his mother, a musician, are like the aliens making human contact. When the spaceship lands, how do they communicate? “They make music on their computers and they are able to speak to each other.” Spielberg responds tellingly: “I’d love to say, you know, I intended that and I realized that was my mother and father, but not until this moment.”
Spielberg’s pre-Fabelmans career is chock full of personal things whose meanings synthesize the more we learn of him: absentee fathers and parental anxieties and the loss (and recapturing) of faith and bravery. All spokes on the Spielbergian trauma wheel. But The Fabelmans reveals a shift in introspection. He observes the world, yes, but also the insularity of the individuals within it; his camera no longer a dissociative tool but a microscope for human behavior and contradictions. By film’s end, Sammy no longer blames his mother for the dissolution of their family but instead sees her as someone complex and shadowed—an accumulation of the many beautiful things that make a person whole.
His latest film, Disclosure Day, carries this self-excavated illumination into the fantastical. A movie about the revelation of extraterrestrial life on Earth and the plan to share it with the world, it’s in obvious dialogue with his other alien films. But it’s also the first time Spielberg’s taken what The Fabelmans uncorked in him and offered it outward: the capacity to see people with the same empathy that’s always defined his greatest heroes.
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Disclosure Day is a curious addition to the Spielbergian oeuvre, a film that initially presents as recognizable science fiction: A secretive corporation called Wardex, working alongside the U.S. government, conceals evidence of extraterrestrial life until one of its employees, Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), steals footage documenting the exploitation and torture of alien beings and sets out to expose it. There are crop circles, strange animal behaviors, impossible technologies, and the dreamlike wonder that’s long defined Spielberg’s encounters with the unknown. But these familiar genre signifiers are a smokescreen for something far stranger: a confrontation not with alien life, but with the human capacity for empathy, embodied most fully by Kansas City meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), whose effervescent warmth and harpsichord voice become the film’s moral center.
Most of Spielberg’s genre heroes share a blueprint. Individuals who stand up to systems of oppression or authority and are emotionally transformed by the experience. But while the institutions they reject operate as abstract forces, his protagonists see the human beings paying the cost. In Jaws, Mayor Vaughn is the embodiment of greed, more concerned with summer profit than the safety of his constituents. But Chief Brody sees the particulars: gore in the water from two recent shark attacks. In Jurassic Park, John Hammond sees dinosaurs as an awe-inducing attraction and a vehicle for capital. But Alan Grant, the paleontologist he hires to recommend his park, sees the danger of resurrecting dormant science and Hammond’s grandchildren in peril. In Saving Private Ryan, military command reduces James Ryan to a dot on a map. But Captain Miller sees the young man behind the orders, and the lives already sacrificed in their attempt to reach him.
What’s the shared word here? “See”—these characters see people, but they also see through the methods of control that erode our compassion. It’s a device as convenient as it is telling of Spielberg. The naivete he is sometimes accused of is always countered by his resignation to human failure. His adult-centered films are not definitionally sentimental. They don’t favor tender emotionality over logic, but use logic as a bedrock for hope. Institutions provide safety and complacency, but safety and complacency make us apathetic. Spielberg’s small hopes are countered by world weariness. The townspeople agree with the mayor: open the beach, kids be damned. Hammond won’t abandon his dinosaur project and causes more destruction in The Lost World. Brody and Grant are disruptors, but evil still corrupts.
In A.I. Artificial Intelligence, one of Disclosure Day’s most interesting links, humans enable the technology that will destroy them. They create robots capable of love, then reject them for loving too much. There is nothing naive about such a worldview: we’re living through the proof of it. There is also nothing to imply sentimentalism is its flaw; Kubrick, who originated the project, also conceived its emotional conclusion, not Spielberg. But both men synthesized the same idea: we create the conditions of our own misery and inflict it elsewhere. We summon extraterrestrial life and abuse it for self interest.
Spielberg’s pessimism necessitates the hope his characters hold against impossible change. It also necessitates the hope he searched for in himself (with the help of frequent collaborator Tony Kushner) and found in The Fabelmans. By honing observation, directing it inward, and stepping through the lens—his own tool of safety—he was able to curate a purer form of empathy: as a key to self-betterment. It’s easier to empathize when you loosen institutional shackles and look deeply into people, especially yourself.
In Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s camera is Margaret Fairchild, an ordinary woman made extraordinary by the extraterrestrial gift of embodying human empathy. The aliens abducted her as a child and imbued her with the power to give others what they’ve given her: tenderness as an elixir for despair. She is their thought experiment. Will her ability to present herself as dead loved ones or speak in every foreign language or gently connect with others via psychic understanding prevent earthly cataclysm and end the abuse of outsiders?
Disclosure Day never definitively answers this question. Kellner and Fairchild—with the assistance of others, including Kellner’s girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) and fellow Wardex defector Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo)—return to KCXE and disclose the footage in a broadcast that goes international. Within moments, the entire world learns that the U.S. government has known about alien life since the Roswell crash and has shielded this knowledge from the public. We see a montage of the global response: families in their living rooms, people on airplanes and on trains and in the streets; the communal witnessing of a coverup that exposes humanity’s cosmic reality. Sammy Fabelman’s perception is forever altered by revelatory footage, and theirs will be, too—no matter how they respond to it, which we purposefully never see.
Margaret Fairchild is a new kind of Spielberg hero. She doesn’t stand up to a system (that’s Kellner); rather, she steps through it into something deeper. She passes on the alien’s message for us: “Listen.” World War III is about to erupt, nukes may soon be dropped, but empathetic communication could be a solution if enough ears hear it. It’s a fantastical suggestion in times like these. The world spins chaotically, and humans are powerless to stop it. Individualism is the only self-protection we know, but it’s a rotten place to live. Corrosive to our very spirit. But still, we fight and hate what we don’t know, even the progressives among us. Opposition to any core belief is a threat.
For most of Spielberg’s career, science fiction has been the mechanism through which he learns and teaches empathy. But in Disclosure Day, empathy itself is the speculative leap. The genre function is inverted: science fiction stops speculating about aliens and starts speculating about us. Aliens are ordinary. Human compassion is extraordinary. The sci-fi is us.
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Disclosure Day is only a month old as of this writing, but its response is already the narrative. Reactions were divisive but also oddly spiteful. Negative word of mouth likely affected its box office. Critics were mixed-positive, but audiences have brandished their anger for its script issues and character development and especially its ending.
It’s fascinating to watch hostility lodged at an earnest message of hope. Disclosure Day is imperfect—there are some thorny knots of inelegant plot and a few too many vague relationships between characters. Stakes can feel unclear at times and dialogue is muddy in places where clarity is essential.
But while subjectivity is the beauty of film— it’s good for the soul of a movie to inspire some friction—a pattern has emerged in the broader feedback, and a dispiriting one at that. Not merely the rejection of imagined hope but the accusatory nature of it.
The response to Disclosure Day is reminiscent of Munich, another wildly divisive Spielberg movie. Munich is the opposite of science fiction: it’s starkly of the now, despite releasing 20 years ago. Munich is set in the aftermath of the 1972 Munich massacre, when eight members of the Palestinian militant organization Black September killed two members of the Israeli Olympic team and took nine others hostage. After the hostages were killed during a failed rescue attempt, an Israeli assassination team led by Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana) is hired to hunt down those believed to be connected to the attack.
Rather than celebrating vengeance, Spielberg uses the mission to interrogate the moral and psychological cost of answering violence with more violence. It’s a film that looks directly at cycles of revenge and nationalism and inherited trauma but proffers no solution. The lack of resolution is the point.
But humans are uncomfortable with ambiguity, even as a narrative tool. Unanswerable dilemmas lead to existentialism and anxiety, or to extremes like religious hysteria and conspiracy. We are incapable of accepting the most basic principle of life: that its greater meaning exists in its intangibilities. Where do we come from? Why do we exist? What is our purpose? We’ll never know. That’s part of our story. But even in fiction, a lack of specificity inspires wrath.
Munich was controversial for both-sidesing the devastating—and ongoing—Israeli/Palestinian war. But it’s a simplification that ignores the larger Spielberg project. Is someone who’s spent decades depicting human darkness politically and naively disengaged? It’s hard to imagine an unconvicted person making Munich. It’s even harder to imagine another mainstream director touching the subject matter with a ten-foot pole. There’s nothing gutless in his approach. His cinema is theatre: audience participation required. Ambiguity is not passivity. Utilized purposefully, it has even more to say.
That’s true of his genre fare, too. Close Encounters is about as ambiguous as it gets. We never learn where the aliens come from or what they really want or whether they’re even good or bad. It’s an enduring classic because the ambiguity is disguised as wonderment. But if it came out today, its autopsy might reveal what Disclosure Day’s has: an audience unwilling to surrender to unreality.
But science fiction is always unreal—rooted in scientific possibility, not actuality. It’s a genre that’s often functioned as a place to imagine better social arrangements than the ones that currently exist. In Close Encounters, first contact inspires awe, not fear—just a few years after Watergate. In Metropolis, class reconciliation creates a better social order—at the height of industrialization. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, an alien visitor probes humans to stop destroying themselves—in the early days of the Cold War. In Interstellar, familial love saves humanity from climate extinction—as California experienced one of its worst-ever droughts. In Arrival, language overcomes political hostility—the same year Trump became president.
Disclosure Day operates with the same speculative hope, but was received much differently. The mechanics of the disclosure seem to be the biggest sticking point. Why would global news networks pick up (or even believe) a report from a small Kansas City station? The proposition is no hokier than ‘love will solve climate change’ or ‘a language that triggers time travel will create world peace.’ Fritz Lang was not naive for make-believing hope, just like Gene Roddenberry wasn’t when he imagined Star Trek—right as the Vietnam War was escalating, and the Cold War was defining global politics, and the Civil Rights Movement was reshaping the country. His post-scarcity, post-racial future was a balm, and remains one.
But dreaming of a reality where the world hits pause to collectively empathize with outsiders… that’s a bridge too far? Are we so absent of hope in 2026 that even the suggestion of it triggers us? Modern audiences seem to evaluate stories based on whether they accurately model reality instead of what they illuminate about it. Optimism is asked to justify its existence. And if the audience recoils at the idea that humanity might collectively choose compassion, maybe Spielberg was never the naive one. Maybe, with Disclosure Day, he accurately diagnosed the problem we refuse to.
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We sit in the darkness watching Disclosure Day, like Sammy in his bedroom. The gentle whir of a projector is now silently digital, but it still speaks the same language—one Spielberg taught many of us in the first place. The filmmaker who dared us to dream is now inviting us to take another leap of imagination: to see and listen and move with compassion before it’s too late. Whether we accept the invitation, well, that says more about us than it does him.
Margaret Fairchild, in her practical shoes and sun-yellow sweater, is all of us. Traumatized children with anxiety disorders wishing we were somewhere else. But she’s something more, too. Not a Brody or a Grant, individual cogs in a greed-driven system using hope as a cudgel. She’s an observer—of the weather and the news and the people around her—aware of and affected by it all. An embodiment of empathy and a tether back to ourselves. Spielberg’s lens but also Spielberg himself, taking their lessons and suggesting something better. Looking through the darkness and imagining light.
In The Fabelmans, Spielberg learned that art can alter perception. We may have grown beyond the cinematic language and pop culture landscape he created—though it’s funny to suggest his irrelevance when he’ll never and cannot be irrelevant—but now he’s gifting us something new. A science fiction movie that isn’t asking us to imagine aliens, but to imagine ourselves differently.