Steven Spielberg is back!
After years of making smaller movies that – let’s be honest – didn’t gross as much as they should have, the one-time king of the summer blockbuster reclaimed his throne last weekend with Disclosure Day, a new sci-fi film starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor and Colman Domingo that grossed a reported $44 million at the domestic box office.
Without giving too much away, the movie depicts aliens in UFOs who want to study humankind.
The success of the film has spurred interest in aliens in cinema, and specifically, sci-fi flicks depicting humans encountering UFOs.
Watch With Us has curated a brief list of three great UFO movies you should watch if you liked Disclosure Day or simply have an interest in the subject.
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‘Nope’ (2022) – Netflix
The Haywood ranch has seen plenty of odd things in its century-long existence, but when something appears to move in the night sky, brother-and-sister owners OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Em (Keke Palmer) believe a UFO is hovering high above. But why is it there in the first place? And why does it deposit random objects like coins, clothes and even blood on the ground? Spurred on by a mixture of curiosity and the prospect of financial gain, they decide to investigate with the help of Fry’s Electronics employee (Brandon Perea) and a daredevil movie cinematographer (Michael Wincott). But these visitors from another planet don’t want their “unidentified” status to change, and they’ll do anything OJ and Em from exposing them to the public.
Director Jordan Peele followed up his horror hits Get Out and Us with the grounded sci-fi Nope, and it’s probably his best movie to date. He is clearly inspired by Spielberg’s past films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he injects his own distinct strain of horror amid all the Spielbergian awe. (That brief scene inside the ship still terrifies me.) The UFO depicted in Nope is stealthy and mean – it acts less like a ship and more like a predator, and the great VFX and direction make you believe little green men in flying saucers are the scariest things on Earth – and the galaxy.
‘Fire in the Sky’ (1993) – MGM+
More and more people believe that aliens are real – hell, even government officials are openly acknowledging the existence of extraterrestrial life. But there have been some who have been claiming they had a close encounter with the alien kind for years, like Travis Walton (D.B. Sweeney). He claims he was abducted and experimented on by aliens, which he detailed in his 1978 book, The Walton Experience. That book was adapted into the 1993 film Fire in the Sky, which dramatizes the events leading up to, during and after his abduction.
Walton’s story isn’t all that different from the stereotypical alien abduction stories we’ve seen over the years: a working-class dude with a criminal record gets probed by some E.T.s, which no one believes. But what separates Walton’s account, and the movie, from others is the detail he provides about his abduction. When the film depicts his time with the aliens, it’s legitimately terrifying. Tethered by strange devices and injected with weird substances, Walton is subjected to all kinds of torture, and the filmmakers treat his account as a real-life horror film. Fire in the Sky is the last major movie based on an alleged alien abduction, and it remains one of the best.
‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ (1978) – Tubi
When people think of UFOs, they usually think of metallic ships flying in the night sky. But what if the objects flying weren’t ships but rather something smaller and deadlier? That’s the concept behind the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which updates the 1956 original with a more downbeat vibe. After parasitic spores from space land in San Francisco, they rapidly grow into plant-like pods that, when placed near a sleeping human, reproduce an exact double – and kill the original. These body snatchers gradually take over the city, leaving only a handful of survivors, like Donald Sutherland’s Matthew and Brooke Adams’ Elizabeth, left to stop them.
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The 1956 version ended on a hopeful note, with the military arriving just in time to stop the invasion from spreading. There’s no such happy ending here, as the military has already been compromised – along with everyone else. Unlike other UFO pictures, there’s a sense of the inevitable lingering through the picture. You can only stay away for so long, and as more humans become emotionless pod people, giving in to conformity seems like a better option than staying awake and fighting a war no one can win. That’s what makes the ‘78 Body Snatchers so unsettling – with people now addicted to looking at their phones and doomscrolling social media, the alien invasion could’ve already happened, and we didn’t even notice it.
