Steven Spielberg is back with a new alien movie called Disclosure Day, and it plays on the themes of his past efforts in the sci-fi genre. Spielberg has a strong history in alien movies, and especially those that explore the idea of first contact. It was 49 years ago that he released his first sci-fi film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film that looked with wide-eyed wonder at the idea of making contact with life forms from another planet.
He followed up a few years later with E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, which looked at actually making contact with an alien itself, and then two decades later, Spielberg showed a different sort of first contact with an alien invasion in War of the Worlds. It is clear that the director has a strong eye for what makes these alien contact movies so special, and based on reviews from Disclosure Day, he has succeeded in this area again.
Of course, Spielberg isn’t the only director who has mastered the idea of making first contact with aliens, whether that is peaceful or through war. Throughout movie history, filmmakers have wondered what it would be like to meet aliens for the first time, and they deal with this through peaceful interactions, suspicious approaches, or, in more than one case, outright hostility. In every situation, it offers a look at one of sci-fi’s best questions. What if we aren’t alone out there?
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Annihilation (2018)
Written and directed by Alex Garland, and adapted from Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel of the same name, Annihilation shows humanity as they make first contact with an alien lifeform that no one understands. One team has already gone into what scientists call the Shimmer, which is a quarantined zone of mutating plants and animals caused by an alien presence that emerges from a meteor that strikes the St. Marks Lighthouse in Florida.
The movie starts with a second team entering to try to figure out what the alien life form wants. This is an all-female team led by Lena (Natalie Portman), who learns her husband is the only survivor from the first team. What makes this movie unique is that the alien life form is depicted as utterly non-human, refracting and duplicating DNA rather than communicating. Rather than humanoid aliens, the first contact here is like nothing any human has ever witnessed.
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The Abyss (1989)
James Cameron has directed some of the biggest movies in Hollywood history, including three of the highest-grossing movies in history with Titanic, Avatar, and Avatar: The Way of Water. However, one of his best movies was a film before he made any of those. In 1989, Cameron directed The Abyss, a movie starring Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Michael Biehn. The first contact here is with benevolent aquatic aliens living in the deep ocean trench beneath an undersea oil platform.
However, the movie does what many alien movies do best, and it makes the humans the threat from the start. In this case, it is an unhinged Navy SEAL (Biehn) who mistakes the aliens as a Soviet threat and tries to detonate a nuclear warhead against them. The end of the movie, with the aliens showing one of the survivors a vision of humanity’s self-destructiveness, helps The Abyss deliver a strong message in what proved to be Cameron’s arrival as a big-time sci-fi director.
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District 9 (2009)
District 9 is an alien first contact movie that shares a strong theme with real-world socio-political issues. Directed and co-written by Neill Blomkamp in his feature debut, District 9 has the aliens arrive on Earth hungry and malnourished, seeking shelter. The main ship hovers over Johannesburg, and all the aliens are given shelter, but in a militarized internment camp, making the film a pointed allegory for apartheid and xenophobia.
The plot then follows a human bureaucrat who oversees the aliens’ relocation efforts. However, when he is exposed to alien fluid, he begins mutating into one of them, and the film shows how even a human can end up ostracized if those around him see him as an alien and not one of them. Shot with handheld cameras and using faux interviews, this is an alien first contact movie whose message ended up all too real.
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The Thing (1982)
Not all alien first contact movies are peaceful, and some are downright horrific. In John Carpenter’s The Thing, the horror director remakes the classic The Thing from Another World, but Carpenter takes it in a more horrific direction. The first contact here is an alien who can shape-shift into any other organism, starting with a dog and then moving on to the crew at an outpost in the Antarctic. The entire theme of this movie is paranoia, and that stems from the era of the Cold War.
In movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the entire theme was that people couldn’t even trust their own neighbors. Here, it is in a remote location, and even the small crew who have worked together for years can’t trust that one of their own isn’t the alien in disguise. While a box office flop when it was released, The Thing has become one of the most beloved horror movies of all time.
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Independence Day (1996)
While The Thing showed an alien first contact invasion on a small level, in a remote icy location, Independence Day does it on a massive scale that shows aliens attacking all corners of the Earth. Directed by Roland Emmerich, Independence Day sees enormous alien ships position themselves over major world cities before launching a coordinated assault. The aliens then destroy important landmarks, including the impressive destruction of the White House.
The movie then turns into a giant action movie, with the United States helping lead an assault on the alien invasion, attempting to bring down what appears to be an unstoppable threat. Independence Day ended up as the top-grossing movie of 1996, and it helped make Will Smith a star.
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The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)
The Day the Earth Stood Still is a movie that takes a markedly different direction when it comes to first contact with aliens. Rather than having the aliens arrive and attack the Earth, or as in District 9, aliens looking for help, this 1951 movie sees the aliens arrive with an offer to help. Directed by Robert Wise and based on Harry Bates’s 1940 short story “Farewell to the Master,” this movie sees an alien visitor named Klaatu arrive on Earth with his towering robot Gort.
As expected, the first response is fear and outward hostility toward Klaatu when the saucer lands in Washington, D.C. When Klaatu goes undercover as a human to see what life on Earth is like, what he discovers is horrific. When humans shoot and kill him to eliminate the alien, his robot is activated to resurrect Klaatu. Klaatu then reveals there are forces bigger than humans that will deal with any further acts of aggression. It is a lesson movie that shows the path that humans have taken and what that could result in.
In 1997, Robert Zemeckis directed the movie Contact, based on the 1985 novel by Carl Sagan. Jodie Foster stars as SETI scientist Dr. Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway, who detects evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The first contact here comes from a radio signal from the Vega star system, which contains hidden engineering blueprints for a transport machine. This allows Arroway to meet the alien intelligence.
This is a more scientifically based sci-fi movie about the first contact with aliens. The biggest angle here is how governments, scientists, and religious organizations react to the news that there is proof of alien life.
Directed by Steven Spielberg, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is the director’s most successful alien movie, and one of the best first contact movies of all time. The big thing about this movie is that the first contact is made by children who find the alien scientist stranded on Earth. However, what makes this movie stand out is that the U.S. government is aggressively trying to capture and experiment on the gentle alien botanist.
So many movies and TV shows are influenced by E.T., including Stranger Things, especially when it comes to children actively trying to help protect someone different from evil government scientists and military personnel. The movie was nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Picture, and it defined what friendly alien first contact movies looked like.
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Arrival (2016)
Arrival is a first contact alien movie that shares a strong similarity to Contact and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, Arrival stars Amy Adams as linguist Louise Banks, recruited by the U.S. Army to communicate with newly arrived aliens. The film sees 12 extraterrestrial spacecraft hover over different locations around the world, making the first contact be a global, multinational event.
The aliens are seven-limbed heptapods, nicknamed Abbott and Costello, who communicate through circular written symbols rather than speech. It is up to Louise to figure out what they are saying and what they want, so humanity can understand if this is a peaceful arrival or the prelude to an attack. The twist on why they are there is important, but this is Louise’s story, and it proves that first contact movies can be about more than just the aliens.
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Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)
Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day looks like it will be more similar to his first sci-fi alien first contact movie than any other sci-fi film he has made to date. In 1977, Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released, and it was all about the excitement of aliens arriving on Earth for the first time. The main character is a blue-collar Indiana worker named Roy (Richard Dreyfuss), who has an alien encounter that gives him visions of a mountain.
Roy joins in with other people who are also led to this mountain, which is where the first contact takes place. This isn’t about an alien invasion, or even about the aliens bringing a message from the stars. Instead, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a first contact movie about the excitement of learning there is life in the stars, and how it changes the lives of the people who finally help discover this.