Steven Spielberg‘s Disclosure Day (now streaming on VOD platforms like Prime Video) is not exactly an alien invasion thriller. He’s only done one of those, 2005’s War of the Worlds, and in a lot of ways, Disclosure Day feels as much like a response to that movie as a spiritual sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, his 1977 hit that some speculated he might be secretly sequel-izing with his latest film. But no, Disclosure Day is not Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, nor is it another movie about aliens laying waste to the globe (even though it was released awfully close to the 30th anniversary of Independence Day). Instead, like so many of Spielberg’s alien movies, it’s actually about people (though he does believe in aliens, too). Specifically, people who have been affected by alien visitation, and now find themselves drawn into a web of intrigue as they attempt to disseminate previously secret information about these aliens to the entire world, all at once.

This leads to a very different sort of sci-fi movie climax, one that has more in common with Spielberg’s The Post than you might expect. Some have called his conclusion hopelessly Boomer-coded and naive; others have called it deeply moving. Some audiences (like my 10-year-old daughter, who otherwise enjoyed the movie) felt like it ends on a cop-out. So what is Spielberg ultimately saying with his loopy, unpredictable, extremely Spielbergian conclusion? Let’s dig further into the movie, with full disclosure of spoilers, and figure it out.

**Spoilers for Disclosure Day follow**

The movie opens in media res, with Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) participating in some kind of exchange where he gives up some hardware containing classified information in exchange for the return of his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson). But Daniel and Jane use some kind of unfamiliar weapon to threaten the men who have held her hostage, and escape together, with the classified files still in their possession. The whole movie is essentially about a private contract firm pursuing Daniel and Jane, hoping to retrieve those files, which contain ample evidence of extraterrestrial contact with Earth.

Daniel’s story is intertwined with Margaret (Emily Blunt), an ambitious TV weathergirl who finds herself unexpectedly able to understand and speak in multiple languages, as well as utilize some form of extrasensory perception. That draws her toward Daniel, and the movie eventually reveals that both Daniel and Margaret had contact with the aliens as children, and were given different power sets: He intuitively understands the math that makes up the aliens’ language, while she has their gift of communication. They come to terms with this realization in a sequence that recreates Margaret’s childhood home as an environment where their repressed memories can come flooding back.

Ultimately, Margaret decides to join Daniel’s quest to liberate this information and broadcast “full disclosure” of the alien contact to the whole world. Jane, who once trained to become a nun before deciding she couldn’t go through with it, has worried that this revelation will destroy or irrevocably alter the faith of many religious believers, because they’ll be faced with a different form of “higher power” than they’ve been trained to expect. Similarly (albeit less humanistically), the company in pursuit of Daniel and the files argues that it is too dangerous for humanity at large to be made aware of otherworldly life. There’s also the matter of the footage itself, some of which features abject cruelty and experimentation visited upon these creatures by the U.S. government and others.

Disclosure Day Ending Explained: What Happens When Aliens Go Public?

The climax of Disclosure Day involves Margaret using her broadcasting experience to deliver proof of 70 years’ worth of alien encounters to the world. Spielberg depicts this as an epochal breaking news event, cutting to viewers around the world stopped dead in their tracks to watch these revelations unfold, whether on televisions or smartphones — though notably, the broadcast itself is from an old-fashioned network affiliate in Margaret’s Kansas City home. That particular medium, the composite nature of the movie’s UFO lore (the aliens look like stereotypical aliens, grayish and slim with big, dark eyes), and the shots of people staring wide-eyed at this footage (rather than shrugging it off as an A.I. deepfake, or muttering that the aliens had it coming for not coming onto this planet the right way) have prompted some to describe Spielberg’s depiction of this whole section as hopelessly corny and out-of-touch.

There’s even an escalating global conflict in the background of the movie, serious enough for characters to be doing apocalyptic-style supply runs even before hearing anything about aliens, that seems to freeze in its tracks as the world watchtes the alien footage. After the events of the past quarter-century, how can this filmmaker’s view of humanity be anything but a Baby Boomer delusion that should have been expired years ago? Or was maybe even actively murdered by a quorum of Boomers themselves?

With that in mind, the actual closing moments of the movie are arguably even more enervating. An actual alien is wheeled out (from where? Chaperoned by who?) into the TV studio, and whispers something to Margaret, who, remember, has the gift of communication and understanding. She turns to the camera to impart what the alien has said to the world at large — which is now, we’ve seen, watching intently. She says, to the TV camera and to Spielberg’s: “Listen.” And then the movie cuts to black. Roll credits.

This is intentionally open-ended, with two obvious (and potentially overlapping) meanings: “Listen” as in, “Listen up, here are the details of what the alien just whispered to me,” or the simple, single-word command, or possibly plea: listen to each other, rather than reacting with violence or hostility. Even if the latter isn’t literally all that Margaret is going to say, that’s all we hear, and so it’s more than fair to interpret it that way. It’s the ultimate confirmation of Spielberg’s soggy, centrist, milquetoast, inane, quasi-apolitical intentions.

Or is it? I’m not so sure that’s exactly what Spielberg is up to here. Disclosure Day is a much more optimistic film than his War of the Worlds, an alien invasion movie that itself felt like an answer to the cosmic mysteries of Close Encounters, the gung-ho-but-hands-clean warfare of Independence Day, and the real-life horrors of 9/11 all at once. Yet there’s a clear sense, based on War of the Worlds and other Spielberg movies of the past 20 years, that Disclosure Day isn’t so much his vision of how the world is, but what he hopes it could still be.

Even that hope is relatively open-ended. The people gathered around their screens aren’t necessarily experiencing newfound togetherness. We don’t see what pundits and talking heads start blabbing about as soon as the news breaks, or what statements governments (including our own) issue in response. We don’t see more than a few minutes’ worth of reactions from anyone, really; we only see the pause. We instinctively hope that it doesn’t precede a storm. Margaret asks us to listen, maybe we learn forward in our seats, and the movie ends, leaving the ultimate fate of this information in this world unknown. Spielberg isn’t asking for a lifetime’s worth of disbelief to be suspended indefinitely. He’s asking for a moment, and not even necessarily a moment of peace (though would that be so bad?) but a moment of quiet.

In this sense, it’s possible to read Disclosure Day as a reverse course from War of the Worlds, where aliens stood in for a terrorist attack, mankind quickly became stand-ins for insurgent responses to invasion, and, as in the original source material, Earth is saved mainly by a whim of nature, not our ability to band together and persevere — or to listen. Yet I don’t know that Spielberg is so much repenting for that movie, either; it’s more like he’s arguing with himself (both-sides-ing himself, even?) about where humanity is headed. Disclosure Day also feels like a conscious throwback to a lot of pre-9/11 alien material. There’s the aforementioned ID4, as well as more conspiracy-minded stories on The X-Files, both of which take government cover-ups of alien visitation as a given. Is Spielberg attempting to challenge the notion that the world was a simpler and more optimistic place in the 1990s, and reconcile those tropes with our fraught contemporary situation?

It’s not entirely clear, and for an entertainer sometimes criticized for coddling the audience or holding its hand, the optimistic yet open-ended nature of Disclosure Day‘s finale is too interesting (or, for some, too moving) to be ascribed to a cheap cop-out into hopecore territory. If anything, it’s a different sort of filmmaker’s fantasy: That images really do still have the power to stop us in our tracks, even if they won’t necessarily all suddenly transport us to the same page.

Spielberg may not know where humanity is headed, and may not be so starry-eyed as to believe in our innate goodness. But he certainly believes in cinema.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.