The cinema of alien contact, from Close Encounters to Disclosure Day
Science fiction cinema has always been drawn to one question above all others: what happens when we are not alone? The best films on the subject are not about explosions or invasions. They are about communication, fear, wonder, and the slow realisation that the universe does not revolve around us.
The films that got there first
Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) remains the definitive first-contact film. It understood something that most science fiction still gets wrong: that contact would not begin with a handshake or a laser blast, but with confusion, obsession, and music. Roy Neary's journey from ordinary man to chosen witness is one of the great character arcs in American cinema.
Spielberg returned to the subject with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), scaling the cosmic down to the suburban. Where Close Encounters was about adults grappling with the incomprehensible, E.T. was about a child who simply accepted it. Both films argue that wonder is the correct response to the unknown.
Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016) took a different approach entirely. Based on Ted Chiang's short story, it made linguistics the centre of first contact - the radical idea that understanding an alien language could reshape how we perceive time itself. It is the most intellectually ambitious alien-contact film of the past two decades.
Robert Zemeckis's Contact (1997), adapted from Carl Sagan's novel, asked what happens when science and faith collide in the face of extraterrestrial evidence. Jodie Foster's performance as Dr. Ellie Arroway is one of the most grounded portrayals of a scientist in any genre film.
And then there is Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), which asked the most unsettling question of all: what if the aliens contact us, and we cannot understand them - not because they are too different, but because we do not understand ourselves?
The UFO question, reframed
For decades, the term UFO carried baggage - tabloid headlines, conspiracy theories, grainy photographs of hubcaps thrown into the air. That changed. The United States government formally adopted the term UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena), and what was once dismissed as fringe became the subject of congressional hearings, Pentagon task forces, and serious investigative journalism.
The shift from UFO to UAP is not just semantic. It represents a change in how institutions and the public engage with the question of unexplained aerial observations. Whether you think the answer is extraterrestrial, atmospheric, or technological, the conversation is no longer happening in the margins.
Spielberg's next film
Steven Spielberg is returning to the subject that defined his early career. His upcoming film Disclosure Day engages directly with the modern UAP conversation - not the UFO mythology of the 1970s, but the declassified footage, the whistleblower testimonies, and the institutional acknowledgment that something is in the sky and we do not know what it is.
Spielberg is the filmmaker best equipped to handle this material. He has spent fifty years thinking about what contact means, and he has never once settled for easy answers. Disclosure Day is one of the most anticipated films on our radar.
All of the films mentioned in this article are available in the Official Cinema library.