Spielberg culminates his most personal trilogy about extraterrestrial life

In one of the most celebrated and viral moments of the interview program for cinema personalities Inside the Actors Studio, host James Lipton speaks with Steven Spielberg about how the divorce of the director's parents when he was young inspired some of his films. “Steven, your father was a computer specialist and your mother was a pianist. And in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), when the spaceship lands, humans and aliens communicate by making music with computers,” Lipton points out. Spielberg listens and smiles, between surprised and moved: “I would like to say I wanted it to be a metaphor for my parents' relationship, but I hadn't realized it until now”.

During the 70s and 80s, when he became Hollywood's most paradigmatic director and defined commercial cinema as we understand it today, Spielberg never stopped being an author who projected his personal demons into his films, especially in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), two works that explore the possibility of an encounter between humanity and extraterrestrials through very different but complementary stories. They were great spectacles for the public that, more or less consciously, transcended the dreams of that heartbroken child who wanted to make movies and looked at the stars with a desperate longing for connection and understanding.

The Day of the Revelation, which premieres this Friday, is the film that culminates Steven Spielberg's trilogy about a positive contact between humanity and an alien civilization. It is, like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a great cinematic spectacle directed with narrative wisdom, but this time imbued with a humanity that no longer sublimes childhood traumas but dialogues with the sociopolitical context of a polarized world entrenched in the fear of the different. The film is a product of its time in the same way that War of the Worlds (2005), his foray into the alien invasion genre, was, an exception that should be understood primarily as a reaction to the trauma of 9/11.

At 79 years old, Spielberg has revisited past themes to address present-day problems and no longer glances at his parents' tragedy but at the world he will leave to his children and grandchildren. In short, a song to empathy that resonates in the message that the aliens from The Day of the Revelation send through the presenter played by Emily Blunt: “Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know.” Unlike the intensely personal and explicitly autobiographical The Fabelmans (2022), here all the director's concerns pass through the sieve of cinematic genres, in this case a fantastic action and conspiracy thriller that is structured around a script based on an original idea by Spielberg and written by a somewhat uninspired David Koepp allergic to risks.

Fox Mulder's Ultimate Fantasy

The plot has two vertices: the cybersecurity expert (Josh O’Connor) who risks his life to reveal the secrets of the corporation for which he has worked for the last eight years and the weather girl from a local Kansas television (Blunt) to whom a little bird –literally– transmits the ability to speak all known languages and read others' minds. Both are pursued by the head of this corporation (Colin Firth), who, in addition to an army of mercenaries, has technology that allows him to penetrate alien consciousness and subjugate wills. In a way, The Day of the Revelation functions as the ultimate fantasy of Fox Mulder, the character who in the series The X-Files embodied faith in extraterrestrial life as an unquestionable principle and attributed the lack of empirical evidence to a wicked government conspiracy.

But more than an exercise in distrust of power, the film opts for a modern humanism, for a secularized spirituality ("I refuse to be a religion," Blunt's character rebels) which, in essence, has a lot to do with the belief in cinema as a shared event and experience, of which Spielberg is one of the great modern apostles. Or is the final scene of the film, even though broadcast on television, not an allegory of the power of screens to unite people in a moment of confrontation and distrust, an act of faith in times of fake news and AI-generated images?

Everything in The Day of the Revelation breathes the classic Spielberg aroma: the soundtrack by John Williams, still active at 94 years old, the cinematography by Janusz Kaminski, who has not left Spielberg's side since Schindler's List (1993), and, above all, an experienced and wise director who films extraordinary action sequences such as O'Connor and Blunt's escape by jumping onto a moving freight train or a sublime camera movement that follows O'Connor to one side and the other of a fence. Having a master like Spielberg directing with the energy and enthusiasm of a teenager and expanding an already exceptional filmography with ambitious and relevant films like this is truly out of this world, and it should be celebrated.