Prior to the release of Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg directed three films about alien contact, and in each one, he seems to be working out some internal issue related to his childhood or his own responsibilities as an adult. War of the Worlds (2005) is a 9/11-coded story of a divorced father reconnecting with his son during an alien invasion, while 1982’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial channels Spielberg’s feelings about his parents’ divorce. In his 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg’s stand-in Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss) is compelled to abandon his family by a force he neither understands nor controls. It’s not hard to see this as the director’s subconscious statement about following the siren song of his own storytelling ambitions to the exclusion of starting a family of his own. Nearly 50 years after Close Encounters,Disclosure Day arrives as a thriller in conversation with Spielberg’s masterpiece, though not always in the way he intended.

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