Steven Spielberg may be the master of every conceivable genre, but he is especially keen on films about alien visitors. They appeared in Firelight, the film he made as a teenager in 1964, and he has returned to the subject in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (What do you mean those were “interdimensional beings”? That still counts!) More than six decades on from Firelight, he has made Disclosure Day, an epic drama starring Josh O’Connor, Emily Blunt, Colin Firth and Colman Domingo. Along with screenwriter David Koepp, he imagines a scenario in which aliens have already made contact with humans, but the world’s governments have kept that contact secret – until now. “The question has always remained for me: are we alone on our own planet?” Spielberg said in Empire. “That question has not only haunted me, but it has inspired me. But, I think, it has now resolved itself to my satisfaction in Disclosure Day.”
