5 Great Sci-fi Alien Conspiracy Movies to Watch After Disclosure Day

The existence of aliens is becoming more science fact and less science fiction by the day. And yet, despite the encroaching revelation that we are definitely not alone in the universe, Hollywood and audiences all over the world still like a great alien conspiracy movie to get the mind and the pulse racing.

The sub-genre and the real-world circumstances that inspire it have evolved alongside changing circumstances and new information. Now we basically have two kinds of alien conspiracy films: ones where humans are sabotaging contact with benevolent extraterrestrials, or ones where the visitors from another planet don’t come to Earth with good intentions.

If you’ve seen Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, you already know what kind of alien conspiracy film that was (no spoilers!). Our list of 5 other alien conspiracy films contains both kinds, but all of them are great if you want more.

5. 10 Cloverfield Lane

We love a good hybrid film, and 10 Cloverfield Lane is one of the best of the bunch. Mixing alien invasion conspiracy with a psychological thriller, this was the film that put Predator franchise savior Dan Trachtenberg (Prey, Predator: Badlands) on the map.

With just three actors (John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and John Gallagher Jr.), Trachtenberg crafts a Hitchcockian thriller about a girl (Winstead) who gets in a car accident driving down the road one night, and wakes up to find she’s seemingly been abducted and locked in a room. The man who took her, Howard (Goodman), claims that aliens have invaded the Earth, something catastrophic has occurred, he saved her life by taking her to his underground shelter, and that going back outside is currently fatal. Another “roommate named Emmett (Gallagher) backs Howard’s claim, but no one can fully trust one another.

The film peels back slow layers to reveal just how real anyone’s story is, and what is truly going on outside. It’s become a cult classic and is a must-watch for any sci-fi-thriller fan.

4. The Arrival (1996)

Before David Twohy became Vin Diesel’s creative partner and the director of the Riddick franchise (which will continue with Riddick: Furya), he directed Charlie Sheen in this underrated 1990s sci-fi/thriller. Sheen plays a radio astronomer named Zane Zaminsky, who is part of a research team that detects a radio signal from extraterrestrial origins. When Zane tries to report his findings through the proper channels, he finds himself getting fired, blacklisted, and his research destroyed. As a civilian, Zane takes on a job as a workman on TV satellite dishes, while secretly using the gig to resume looking into the alien signal. But the more Zane investigates and looks for allies, the more dead bodies keep piling up, and the more it seems that an alien force is targeting him to cover up a dark conspiracy.

Twohy’s film went bust at the box office – but only because it had the grave misfortune of telling a low-budget alien conspiracy story just weeks before Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day would become a box office phenomenon. Audiences chose with their theater dollars, but Twohy has since found his lane as an accomplished cult sci-fi director. The Arrival has some dark twists and turns, and is so very ’90s in the best way possible.

3. Super 8

Steven Spielberg is known for making big action/adventure/sci-fi films (Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Minority Report, Disclosure Day), but he also had a major hand in giving ’80s and ’90s kids iconic films through Amblin Entertainment. That era inspired a whole new generation of filmmakers like J.J. Abrams, who decided to pay Spielberg and Amblin homage with his 2011 film, Super 8.

The movie follows a small-town teenage boy named Joe (Joel Courtney) who lost his mother in a workplace accident. To cope, Joe begins making a Super 8 movie with his friend Charles (Riley Griffiths) for a competition, and is soon joined by a larger gang of kids, including Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning) the daugther of the drunk who Joe’s mom was covering for at work when she died. All that teenage emotion and creativity takes a hard left turn when a night shoot for the movie captures a catastrophic train derailment and the escape of a creature that’s not of this world. The kids turn their efforts to documenting the mystery, while trying to avoid the shady government forces that descend upon their town.

Super 8 is classic Amblin: scary, emotional, fun, adventurous, funny, with big movie spectacle that’s hard to forget. Speilberg was proud, and you will be entertained.

2. Arrival (2016)

Before he was deep into the Dune trilogy, director Denis Villeneueve and screenwriter Eric Heisserer adapted Ted Chiang’s sci-fi novella “Story of Your Life” into an Oscar-nominated sci-fi drama that is now widely regarded as one of the best in the genre.

The story follows an expert linguist named Lousie Banks (Amy Adams), who suffers the soul-breaking loss of her twelve-year-old daughter to an incurable disease. Banks is called into service by the US Army, after twelve extraterrestrial ships take up positions over a dozen locations across Earth. Together with other scientists like physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), Banks is tasked by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) to help discern both the aliens’ language and intentions before the invaders can attack, or Earthlings decide to strike first, risking all-out war.

Banks quickly learns that the devil is in the details of translation, as an intiial message from the aliens hinges on key interprations like “weapon” vs. “tool” and “offer” vs. “use.” However, as she begins to bridge the gap and make contact with the seven-limbed beings that are dubbed “heptapods,” the more her mind starts to be affected in wild ways that only further the mystery of whether the aliens are truly doing somethign benevolent for humanity.

Arrival has some of the headiest sci-fi concepts, but also hits the gut with some of the biggest emotional twists. It’s a must-watch.

1. Contact

There are a lot of thematic (and philosphical/spiritual) similarities between Robert Zemeckis’ 1997 sci-fi film Contact and Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. Jodie Foster plays an astronomer named Dr. Ellie Arroway, whose life was forever marked by the premature death of her father. Now an adult, Ellie is studying radio transmissions from space for the government, only to lose her job and get new funding from reclusive billionaire, S.R. Hadden (John Hurt). Just when that funding is about to run out, Ellie makes the discovery of an extraterrestrial signal from the Vega star, that’s 25 light-years beyond the sun.

The signal is found to contain a Earth broadcast that had been picked up by the aliens in 1936, as well as a return message containing tens of thousands of pages of data. The transmission sparks global in-fighting and espionage; Hadden helps Ellie and her team get the primer to decode the alien data, where they find schematics to build a machine that will seemingly transport a single human pilot to make conact with the aliens. Ellie fights to be that pilot, but has to face everything from governments with thier own agendas to religious fanatics willing to do the unthinkable to keep humanity from looking at the universe in a whole new way.

Contact is a sci-fi classic and one of the first films to really pose the question of whether something terrible, or wonderful, could be waiting to greet us out there in far reaches of space.

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