{"id":860,"date":"2026-06-25T15:15:41","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T15:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=860"},"modified":"2026-06-25T15:15:41","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T15:15:41","slug":"the-truth-about-steven-spielbergs-alien-obsession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=860","title":{"rendered":"The Truth About Steven Spielberg\u2019s Alien Obsession"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

This article contains spoilers for the film <\/i><\/b>Disclosure Day<\/b>.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

As much as Steven Spielberg likes aliens, he seems to prefer holding them at arm\u2019s length. The creatures in Close Encounters of the Third Kind <\/i>contact humans using music and lights, but the director offers only glimpses of them, mostly in silhouette. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial <\/i>spends plenty of screen time depicting the titular character as a fish out of water; meanwhile, viewers never get to see the inside of E.T.\u2019s spaceship. And in his adaptation of H. G. Wells\u2019s classic sci-fi novel The<\/i> War of the Worlds<\/i>, the extraplanetary invaders stay largely hidden, preferring to observe humanity from behind their weaponry.<\/p>\n

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Aliens are just as camera-shy in Disclosure Day<\/i>, Spielberg\u2019s newest ostensible examination of them. The movie hinges on a whistleblower releasing evidence of the government\u2019s encounters with UFOs, yet it\u2019s remarkably short on extraterrestrial spectacle. The gray aliens who arrived on Earth decades ago exist on the story\u2019s fringes, masking themselves as wild animals and showing up in the flesh only in the film\u2019s final minutes; they\u2019re otherwise seen in grainy clips of scientists and military officials inspecting and interrogating them. Throughout, they\u2019re spoken of with awe and depicted as both fearsome and vulnerable, all-knowing yet unknowable. Disclosure Day <\/i>is Spielberg\u2019s first summer blockbuster in nearly 20 years, but its enigmatic aliens turn the movie into a strange puzzle\u2014the latest in a long line of attempts by the filmmaker to use them as tools for understanding humans.<\/p>\n

Spielberg\u2019s instinct to show only glimpses of aliens hasn\u2019t always been intentional. Sometimes, he\u2019s obscured the extraterrestrials due to the limitations of movie magic. Like the shark in Jaws<\/i>, the aliens of Close Encounters<\/i> couldn\u2019t quite achieve what the script called for: The wire work involved in making them fly around their mothership proved too frustrating to pull off. Yet the director seems to rely on extraplanetary visitors as catalysts for particularly heady stories, positioning them as intellectual superiors and at times moral compasses. Whereas Spielberg\u2019s other blockbusters involving impressive creatures\u2014the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park<\/i>, the great white of Jaws<\/i>\u2014contend with the question of how to control them, his alien stories consider what humanity can learn from them.<\/p>\n

Again and again, characters become psychically connected to these extraordinarily intelligent tourists: In Close Encounters<\/i>, the aliens are half the size of an average person, but they are sophisticated enough to grant the disaffected Roy (played by Richard Dreyfuss) repeated visions that take him away from his family and everything he\u2019s known. In E.T.<\/i>, Elliott (Henry Thomas), a child coming to terms with his parents\u2019 divorce, perceives his wrinkly friend\u2019s every feeling. And in War of the Worlds<\/i>, the self-centered Ray (Tom Cruise) seems to grasp how the technologically advanced invaders terrorizing Earth think, which enables him to protect his family from their attacks. In these films, aliens are Spielberg\u2019s means for interrogating the limits of human intelligence, a distant north star that allows him to transform straightforward stories into thought experiments. By spotlighting perhaps the greatest unsolved mystery facing humankind, Spielberg gets to mix genres\u2014paranormal horror, conspiracy thriller, family drama\u2014however he wants.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that\u2019s why he treats aliens with the kind of care befitting a museum artifact or a cherished altar. Consider the ones in the much-maligned Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull<\/i>; Spielberg explained in a behind-the-scenes featurette about the making of the movie that he perked up at the idea of including \u201cinterdimensional\u201d beings only once George Lucas, his collaborator on the film, suggested portraying them as members of a revered ancient civilization. (If anything, Spielberg looked genuinely pained at how Lucas initially wanted to incorporate aliens just for the sake of visual spectacle.) By imagining aliens as gods of intelligence, the director shows the possibilities of having knowledge beyond human comprehension.<\/p>\n

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The results can be wonderful\u2014E.T. builds a profound kinship with Elliott; a wordless correspondence seems to transcend space and time at the end of Close Encounters<\/i>\u2014or terrible, as when the invaders in War of the Worlds <\/i>underestimate how deadly microbes can be to their armored bodies. Extraterrestrials are too often portrayed in popular culture as either the unsettling obsession of tinfoil-hatted theorists certain of government cover-ups or as cartoonish humanoids in flying saucers. Spielberg, by contrast, takes them completely seriously\u2014and encourages his audience to do the same.<\/p>\n

War of the Worlds<\/i> may best demonstrate how easily even the most stereotypical aliens, for Spielberg, double as metaphors. Wells conceived of the Martians as a thinly veiled representation of imperialism; Spielberg (working off a script co-written by the Disclosure Day<\/i> screenwriter David Koepp) relates them to the protagonist\u2019s reluctance about being a dad. Tom Cruise\u2019s single-father character, Ray, knows his children so poorly that he doesn\u2019t even remember\u2014or perhaps never knew\u2014that his daughter, Rachel (Dakota Fanning), has a peanut allergy. Ray eventually stops trying to run from the Martians and instead faces them head-on, risking his life for the family he\u2019s now grown closer to. That\u2019s how Spielberg\u2019s alien stories tend to operate: What many of his characters find more astonishing than the presence of aliens are the emotions that they, as humans, have been holding at bay.<\/p>\n

Spielberg has had his aliens play many different parts: his characters\u2019 all-consuming fixation, their closest friend, their worst nightmare. In Disclosure Day<\/i>, perhaps the director\u2019s most earnest and motivational movie yet to incorporate them, the interplanetary visitors are teachers; they push Earthlings to consider how easily empathy, memory, and faith\u2014tenets of the human experience\u2014can be overlooked in the face of overwhelming realities such as, say, world wars. Yet the filmisn\u2019t meant to be a reflection of our present; it\u2019s a distillation of Spielberg\u2019s decades-long thesis about aliens. Whether such creatures exist seems to be beside the point for the director. The mere idea of them, his movies suggest, can remind humans to strive for more\u2014for our minds to be brighter, for our imaginations to run wilder\u2014than simply being alive.<\/p>\n

Read more Alan Greenspan Was \u2018Not Quite God\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The director has spent decades telling stories about extraterrestrials, but his real focus lies on Earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":859,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Truth About Steven Spielberg\u2019s Alien Obsession - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=860\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Truth About Steven Spielberg\u2019s Alien Obsession - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The director has spent decades telling stories about extraterrestrials, but his real focus lies on Earth.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=860\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-25T15:15:41+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=860#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=860\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"The Truth About Steven Spielberg\u2019s Alien Obsession\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-25T15:15:41+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=860\"},\"wordCount\":1065,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=860#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/72ea56204f5f3a30dcebc55e00bab769.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Culture\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=860#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=860\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=860\",\"name\":\"The Truth About Steven Spielberg\u2019s Alien Obsession - 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