Director Steven Spielberg said his new sci-fi film about a mysterious alien presence on Earth could raise fundamental questions among religious audiences about the existence of God.
Disclosure Day, which follows a meteorologist and a cybersecurity expert as they attempt to expose a government cover-up of extraterrestrial activity, explores what happens to one’s faith when an essential truth is suddenly thrown into question, as Spielberg discussed in an interview segment on the CBS Sunday Morning show.
“What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have?” the Jewish director told CBS earlier this week. “Is God our God only on this planet? Or is God a god for every system where there's civilisation and intelligent life, and even developing life?"
Spielberg, who was raised in a reform Jewish household, also revealed that, while Disclosure Day is a work of fiction, he himself believes aliens have actually visited Earth:
"Based on the circumstantial evidence of everything that I've gathered throughout my whole life, everybody I've listened to and every documentary I've ever watched and all the testimonies in Congress that I've heard, I absolutely think that they have been here, and they are here," Spielberg said. "And who knows, maybe they've always been here."
The new film probes concepts of faith and the unknown through people’s willingness (or lack thereof) to believe in the possibility that aliens exist on Earth.
For protagonist Margaret, played by Emily Blunt, this is not an ideological exercise but an urgent personal endeavour to discover why certain strange things have been happening to her.
"The movie takes the position of the believers, or the curious, the ones that have been deeply affected by this," said Spielberg. "The Emily Blunt character, you know, something has happened to her. She has no idea what it is. She has to try to understand why this has upended her life.”
Spielberg, whose fascination with the cosmos emerged when he saw the Perseid meteor shower as a young child, described Disclosure Day as the “bookend” to his 1977 alien thriller Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The new film was inspired by the idea of a small cohort of people knowing about the secret of alien life while the rest of the world remains in the dark.
"Think about this: When the Great Unknown is actually known by some, but not known by all of us, it's that inequity that got me to write the story for Disclosure Day," Spielberg said.
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