Watchmen and Disclosure Day share a similar plot but very different message

Steven Spielberg and Alan Moore both introduce aliens to a world on the brink

As humanity braces for World War III and nuclear annihilation, a conspiracy forms to bring us back from the brink. The dangerous scheme will prove we are not alone in the universe, or even here on Earth; a revelation that has the power to not only avert a doomsday scenario but change our world for the better.

The setup and momentous climax of Alan Moore’s seminal 1986 comic book series Watchmen and Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day are remarkably similar. But despite those similarities, Spielberg takes a radically different approach to Moore, turning a concept from a cynical superhero satire into a deeply humanist tale.

[Ed. note: This article contains major spoilers for Watchmen and Disclosure Day]

While they were released 40 years apart, Watchmen and Disclosure Day both begin by focusing on a world in the grip of nuclear terror. The Doomsday Clock is ticking ever closer to midnight in Watchmen as tensions rise between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the apocalypse feels inevitable. In Disclosure Day, people load up on gasoline and flee major cities as a conflict involving North Korea, Russia, and the U.S. is positioned as a new Cuban missile crisis.

In both cases, the solution is… aliens. In Watchmen, the genius superhero Ozymandias decides this situation is untenable and creates an elaborate conspiracy to give humanity a new enemy. He stages an attack on New York by a giant, squid-like creature, which inspires the superpowers to cooperate against a seemingly alien threat. The rest of the world's superheroes agree to maintain Ozymandias’ lie, killing Rorschach, the only hero who refuses to go along with the fiction for the perceived greater good. (Zack Snyder's 2019 movie adaptation ditches the giant squid, but retains the concept of a fabricated threat to unify humanity.)

While Watchmen is about building an elaborate fabrication to generate fear, Disclosure Day is about exposing the truth to create empathy. In Spielberg’s film, Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) recruits a group of fellow Deep State employees to reveal all the secrets about alien life that the government spent decades keeping. His fellow whistleblowers, like cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), aren’t certain the knowledge they’re revealing will actually help humanity put aside their differences, but they are convinced the truth belongs to everyone, rather than just the elite few who are profiting from keeping those secrets.

Disclosure Day’s aliens can be terrifying. Daniel and Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) were both traumatized by their childhood abductions to the point that they have done their best to repress those memories. The Disclosure Day videos show imposing spacecraft that could easily be perceived as threatening. But Spielberg juxtaposes those images with ones that evoke the vulnerability of the aliens, like the crashed pilots sheltering under umbrellas and the captive Hugo freed stepping out of a wheelchair and gripping Daniel and Margaret’s hands. The aliens take animal form to try to appear less scary to humans, and even after their brutal treatment they don’t want vengeance – just to be understood and to help humanity understand itself.

The impact of the revelation is also far more ambiguous in Disclosure Day than it is in Watchmen. The film ends as the news breaks. There’s no footage of troops drawing down, just images of people around the world utterly engrossed in the footage and a breathless, tearful anchor expressing their collective awe and confusion. Multiple characters wonder throughout the movie if this is the right time for disclosure, questioning its impact on global politics and even the concept of religion. The next step could be an entirely new conflict or arms race as world powers try to catch up.

In that way, Disclosure Day embraces the final words of Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen, who tells Ozymandias, “Nothing ever ends.” It’s an idea Damon Lindelof brilliantly seizes on in his Watchmen miniseries for HBO, which picks up decades after Moore’s story as heroes reconsider the peace Ozymandias built. Spielberg doesn’t present the aliens as necessarily giving humans all the answers to the problems facing Earth, just a new perspective and empathy for each other. He ends his film by simply imploring the audience to “listen.” It’s a moment beautiful in its ambiguity, a declaration of hope that the world might feel like it’s ending, but we can face it together if we realize that we have never really been alone.