Why Steven Spielberg doesn’t consider Disclosure Day to be science fiction
The veteran director says that while his 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was ‘speculative’, Disclosure Day is the real deal
“Those were Froot Loops,” Spielberg says, smiling. “My favourite.”
Spielberg’s latest film, like some of his earliest and most beloved, again concerns what might fall from above. Disclosure Day, now showing at cinemas, returns Hollywood’s pre-eminent big-screen craftsman to one of his most abiding questions: are we alone?
Coming nearly half a century after Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Disclosure Day is a grand bookend for one of the most cosmically minded filmmakers of our time, whose dreams of extraterrestrial life have shaped all of ours. It is a distant answer to the final notes of Close Encounters. But while Spielberg grants his 1977 film was “speculative”, Disclosure Day, he insists, is the real deal.
“It’s my first film that will be considered science fiction that I do not consider to be science fiction,” Spielberg says. “It’s much more reflective of the world as it is evolving and discoveries that are being made as we speak.”
Spielberg, at 79, is trying to revive the alien wonder that has lingered in his mind, from E.T. to War of the Worlds. Disclosure Day, his first summer movie in a decade, is already being hailed as one of his best in years. But this time, Spielberg is testing whether he can conjure some of his trademark film magic less with imagination than with conviction.