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Disclosure Day isn't really about aliens, but about us, says creator Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg thinks we've lost our empathy and is wondering if a little alien invasion might help us find it.
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What exactly is Disclosure Day about? Even the marketing for Steven Spielberg’s new film doesn’t want to give that away. But we’ll tell you what it isn’t about: aliens. Or rather, it isn’t really about aliens. Like most films, Disclosure Day is about people. According to Spielberg himself, it is about finding out where our empathy has gone.
“At the core of Disclosure Day is the question: Where has all our empathy gone?” Steven Spielberg said in a recent interview to promote the film. “Would an actual disclosure day reunite what’s divided, or begin to repair what’s broken in this siphoning away of empathy? And I think that was the personal link for me. There’s more focus in this story on the human connection than even the eventual and hopeful connection between an off-world civilization and the human species.”
We’ve always kind of assumed that Disclosure Day was more about how humans would react to discovering that aliens exist than about the actual existence of aliens themselves because Steven Spielberg isn’t the kind of director to make a movie without some subtext to it. Just like Jurassic Park is about unchecked capitalism, even the most outlandish sci-fi film is really about human beings rather than aliens and spaceships. How the lack of empathy in our current world impacts our ability to deal with aliens is what is going to make Disclosure Day interesting.
Disclosure Day is out in the US on June 12, 2026, so we can all discover our missing empathy together.
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