that’s why it’s back to science fiction

Steven Spielberg has been using science fiction for almost fifty years as a reflection of the concerns of American fears (that is, planetary, because pop culture works the way it does). In 1977 he captured the post-Vietnam spiritual void with aliens coming in peace. In 2005, he processed 9/11 with aggressive invaders. ‘The Day of Revelation’ has some ingredients similar to all of them, although perhaps for the first time in his career, reality has gotten ahead of him.

The constant. Of the 37 films Steven Spielberg has directed, about a quarter are fantasy or, more specifically, science fiction. And of them, six include aliens in their plots. Let’s review some of the most relevant ones:

• Encounters in the third phase (1977): Two years after the end of the Vietnam War. The United States saw the moral authority of its institutions plummet. Spielberg gave the public some hope with a film in which contact with the unknown did not end in war but in amazement: the aliens came in peace and the protagonist followed them into space. Decades later, the Library of Congress included the film in its archives as being “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant.”

• ET the exterrestrial (1982): In the midst of the Reagan era, political discourse insisted on rebuilding the nuclear family as a central value of society. Spielberg put a broken family at the center of his film, with a mother raising her children alone after a divorce, and offered as reparation for domestic trauma the most unlikely friendship: a child and an alien. ‘ET’ claimed that solutions had to be found to heal a fractured society. As Spielberg himself has said, “My favorite science fiction is based on terrestrial problems”.
• ‘War of the worlds’ (2005): Spielberg once said of the 9/11 attacks that “the image that I can’t get out of my head It is that of all the people of Manhattan fleeing over the George Washington Bridge.” It is perfectly perceived in a film that is pure panic, nothing rooted in a specific policy, since as screenwriter David Koepp said in his day, it also functioned as an allegory of Iraqi fear of an American invasion. Koepp also signed ‘Jurassic Park’, the film that showed us the only good billionaire, and now he returns with ‘The Day of Revelation’.

• And even if it is outside the topic of invasions and dealing with social aspects that are not so clearly politicized, it is inevitable to remember science fiction films like ‘AI, Artificial Intelligence’where many first discovered the fashion acronym; ‘Minority Reportas a bridge between the paranoia of the fifties and the era of hypervigilance we live in now; and in a more (sadly) banal tone, ‘Ready Player One’about The Video Game and its implications.

The secrets are over. In December 2017, The New York Times published a report about AATIP, the Pentagon’s secret program to investigate anomalous aerial phenomena with a budget of 22 million dollars. The report described objects that moved in ways that defied known engineering. That journalistic piece, according to Spielberg, restored his interest in the alien topic. In the summer of 2023 he spent two months writing a 50-60 page synopsis of what would happen the day that information became public. The project was officially announced in April 2024.

The year when reality did not waitOn May 8, 2026, five weeks before the premiere of ‘Revelation Day’, the Trump administration ordered the publication of the first 162 declassified files on UAPsincluding diplomatic cables, FBI reports, NASA transcripts and graphic material, all accessible without prior authorization on the war.gov/UFO portal. On May 22, a second delivery arrived with six PDF files, seven audios and 51 videos. The portal intends to continue expanding.

When NASA was worried. Spielberg himself has acknowledged that those congressional hearings “changed everything” for him and that “this stopped being sensationalism and became something that the mainstream media took very seriously.” In this way, ‘The Day of Revelation’ continues to be a social thermometer, although now it does so perhaps at the opposite pole to ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, once the debate has been institutionalized.

In fact, while preparing ‘Close Encounters…’ in the 1970s, Spielberg received a letter from NASA asking him not to make the film. “When I found out that the government was opposed to the film, I found my faith”declared in 1978: “If NASA took the time to write me a twenty-page letter, something was up.” It cannot be said that the Spielberg of today raises the same suspicions as the one from then, and perhaps his new film should be read under that code.

In Xataka | When Spielberg heard one of the best soundtracks in history, he didn’t get it: “I thought it was a joke”