By Movieguide® Staff
Steven Spielberg’s DISCLOSURE DAY opens in theaters today, and Hollywood is back at its favorite pastime — asking whether Christians are ready to have their faith shaken by extraterrestrials.
“There’s a faction in the film that represents a pretty good position of why — possibly because of ontological shock, social dislocation — if this truth were just known overnight, if the government announced, ‘Yes, we have been keeping this from you since 1947,’ that would mess up a lot of people,” Spielberg told Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz during an appearance on “CBS News Sunday Morning” last week.
“No it won’t. Hollywood is obsessed with the idea that the discovery of aliens will rock Christian faith. It’s weird,” Christian podcaster Josh Daws said on X after the clip went viral.
“The only people who think the existence of aliens would mess with Christianity are non-Christians who don’t understand the first thing about Christianity,” said Eric Sammons, editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine, also on X.
The movie stars Emily Blunt as Margaret Fairchild, a TV weather lady who suddenly starts speaking an alien language live on air and then faints. She wakes up compelled to find Dr. Daniel Kellner — played by Josh O’Connor — a math whiz who stole top-secret government videos proving aliens exist. Colin Firth plays the government operative hunting them both down.
There’s real theological content in the movie, not just gesturing toward it. A Mother Superior, when asked about the implications of alien contact, says such a discovery wouldn’t change the Christian church’s teaching about God or salvation. A young woman who was once a novitiate nun still wears a cross, and her mentor explains she didn’t lose faith in God — she lost faith in people.
Movieguide® reviewed the movie ahead of its opening and gave it four out of four stars for entertainment quality while flagging it for extreme caution on family content. The review notes DISCLOSURE DAY carries “positive references to God and Christianity” but mixes them with a pagan worldview — including a humanist line claiming empathy is a learned evolutionary trait and a storyline in which alien technology seems to impart near-omniscient powers onto a human being.
DISCLOSURE DAY also carries 16 obscenities — including one “f” word and multiple “s” and “h” words — one GD profanity, and 19 light exclamatory profanities. Add strong action violence, a kidnapping subplot, and a villain who uses alien technology to try to hypnotize someone into murder, and the movie earns its PG-13 rating in full.
The Movieguide® review addresses the underlying debate directly: “Many Christians believe aliens in UFOs are demons, but how do you explain the apparent physical nature of their flying machines? Other Christians take the position of the nun in the movie, that any intelligent aliens that humans might encounter here on Earth or out in space are also creations of God.”
The movie’s timing isn’t accidental. The Pentagon released a batch of UAP files last month, and Cardinal Robert McElroy recently removed Washington exorcist Monsignor Stephen J. Rossetti from his post after he went viral for expressing his view that “probably many, if not most, of these UFO sightings are, in fact, demons.” Father Chad Ripperger, an exorcist in the Archdiocese of Denver, holds the same position.
Spielberg has been asking alien questions since CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND in 1977. The question DISCLOSURE DAY raises about whether God’s sovereignty extends across the cosmos isn’t actually new for Christians. It just lands differently when it’s coming from a 145-minute blockbuster opening on a Friday.
DISCLOSURE DAY is rated PG-13 and in theaters now. Movieguide® advises extreme caution.
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