There’s a certain kind of science fiction has been absent from the movie theaters for the past few years. The superhero subgenre satiates most audiences’ penchant for science fiction, and some of them can be quite good.¹ But the otherworlds that these films take place in of impending apocalypse, otherworldly places separate from our reality, or in near futures where our Earth has been reshaped into a hypothetical setting that might have roots in our own present and past, but have a freedom from reality.

What I mean to say is that I miss movies about people living in today’s world, a world that’s altered by the discovery of some other that changes the status quo of what could otherwise be a depiction of modernity. I don’t know a good term for these that can separate them from other kinds of science fiction, but to attempt to demarcate, it’s what separates Disclosure Day from James Gunn’s Superman for example.

Disclosure Day is the kind of movie that makes you think about the current day fears of our society. By rooting its characters so firmly in modernity, the film links itself with present-day anxieties. In the same way that Nope’s extraterrestrial discovery allows its characters a resolution to the generational trauma that the movie business brought to them, Disclosure Day’s extraterrestrial conspiracy plot reflects the fear of living in an unempathetic world. Though the threat of an impending World War III looms over the plot, Disclosure Day is Spielberg at his most contemporary, his first film to not take place in a distant past or otherworld since War of the Worlds. The modernity of Disclosure Day makes its explorations of mass communication and conspiracy resonate in an era where it seems every communication network is primed to induce persecutory delusions.

Margaret (Emily Blunt) and Daniel (Josh O’Connor) are guided by their intuition against the rigid principles of secrecy held up by Scanlon (Colin Firth) and government black ops arm Wardex. I was surprised by the in medias res opening scene: Daniel has already committed to his cause of leaking Wardex’s operations to the public and is evading their pursuit. This opening and the choice to delay the reveal of what Daniel’s supposed infohazard actually is challenges us to empathize with his dedication to his cause before we can fully understand it. It’s a bold narrative decision that invites intrigue, and that empathy is first tested with the show stopping interrogation scene establishing Disclosure Day as a world where surveillance penetrates the mind itself, Jane (Eve Hewson) has her knowledge siphoned from her while the stoic Scanlon speaks in obfuscating equivocations.

What makes Disclosure Day so formally thrilling is its commitment to a realist filmmaking style, with the usual Spielbergian sense of wonder evoked by John Williams’s strings swelling being reserved for moments of encounters with the sublime aliens. The movie is edited wildly (to an extent that it often lacks continuity), the constant gloom of the skylines gives the film an especially realist texture, and action scenes are quiet on score and filled with foley and sweeping shots. The escape at the safehouse is the most riveting action sequence I’ve seen all year, the camera expertly framing up to eight vehicles at a time. The blending of classic action movie set pieces with science fiction accents harken to Tony Scott’s Deja Vu, but Disclosure Day’s sci-fi action often blends quality stunt work with fascinating visual effects² that keep the film’s grounded tone intact.

What surprised me most about the film is the rawness of the performances, with the co-leads and villain maintaining a heightened delivery often while surrounded by bewildered skeptics. Firth is especially verbose, his stoicism denigrated to resignation at the death of an old code of ethics. The sincerity of the characters as they argue about the nature of truth and empathy fits the film’s oddball tone, and we watch almost every character overcome skepticism and/or repressed traumas. The elongated finale of the movie emphasizes the importance of mass media as a machine that can generate empathy, the thing that (in the world of the film) is what separates higher order thinking. It makes sense then that the final scene spends so look cross cutting between dozens of newspeople³ being brought to accept the narrative’s major truths. The bleeding heart of Disclosure Day is hard for me not to empathize with, particularly because it is a film about begging to feel understood. In this way it circumvents the kind of overbearing schmaltz that defines so much current science fiction. By challenging its characters and audience to believe in themselves as well as the world-altering secrets of the narrative, Disclosure Day invites a much more genuine level of investment in its claims about the need for genuine understanding. It’s packed with sincerity without a shred of saccharine, which is exactly the flavor of science fiction I’ve been missing.