The most significant revelation surrounding Steven Spielberg’s latest science‑fiction spectacle is not about little green men, but about who now pulls the levers of concealment. At the London launch of Disclosure Day, the director was emphatic: his film is no sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Where that 1977 classic portrayed governments orchestrating a cover‑up, the new picture places the truth in the hands of a “deep state contracting company” — a narrative swerve that, Spielberg insists, mirrors his conviction that today’s most profound secrets are more likely locked inside the servers of big technology firms than in the filing cabinets of Washington. In an era when unelected billionaires shape public reality, the director has swapped the cold‑war state for the boardroom, and in doing so has recast the alien‑conspiracy genre for a post‑truth world.

Viewed from Los Angeles, the film has been hailed as Spielberg’s most urgent work in decades — a “majestic, unnerving” plea to preserve compassion and creativity against a rising tide of callousness. Yet the European reception is far more fractured. Swedish critics have dismissed it as a tired rehash of 1970s UFO clichés, while Italian commentators, though admiring the impeccable direction, fault an overstuffed plot that jumbles political thriller, impending world war and sentimental drama into a fable that never quite transcends its own nostalgia. This transatlantic split underscores a deeper question: does Spielberg’s instinct to locate wonder in the skies still resonate on a continent that increasingly views American blockbuster myth‑making with scepticism?

At the heart of the film is a performance by Emily Blunt that has drawn career‑best notices on both sides of the Atlantic. Spielberg himself has called her a “force of nature”, and the British actor’s steady rise from scene‑stealer in The Devil Wears Prada to the moral core of a globe‑spanning sci‑fi thriller has lent the production a distinctly international gravitas. Alongside her, Colman Domingo plays a soothsayer figure orchestrating the revelation of decades‑old secrets, embodying the film’s central tension: whether the disclosure of alien contact would unite a fractured humanity or tear it apart altogether. The casting reflects a deliberate effort to root the spectacle in recognisable human frailty, even as the film reaches for the cosmic.

The picture arrives at a moment when the very notion of shared truth feels under siege. Spielberg, who has spent half a century scanning the heavens — first as a boy with his engineer father, later in the multiplexes of the world — has long insisted he gazes upward without fear, finding the unknown a safer place than the tumult below. Disclosure Day channels that sensibility into a plea for empathy, daring to suggest that beings from another world might teach us how to reclaim our own humanity. Whether audiences globally will embrace that optimism, or side with the Stockholm critics who see only exhausted mythology, will determine if this late‑career gambit is remembered as a timely intervention or a magnificent folly. For a director who once dreamt only of listening to an extraterrestrial, the conversation has never been more urgent.