The African Queen (1952)

Stephen Spielberg recently garnered controversy for claiming that his new film Disclosure Day would cause Christians to ask questions about their faith.  Whether that prediction will end up true or not, there is another ideology that we should be questioning in light of this film.  That being anthropocentrism, the often-unconscious belief that human beings are central in the story of the universe. 

That way that this film is anthropocentric isn’t necessarily obvious, until it smacks you in the face like a car driving another car into a train. In a film that is entirely centered around the existence of aliens, the aliens play almost a bit part in the movie. One realizes that this film isn’t about aliens, it’s about humans who are motivated by aliens. The aliens aren’t the center in the movie, they’re merely the driving force behind the real center, the human characters.

Disclosure Day talks up its extra-terrestrials as supreme beings of high intelligence who use math to communicate, even orally. One would think that such an interesting species would take center stage. Maybe it could make sense to say, because the audience is human, the protagonists should be human to be relatable, or maybe that it’s interesting to explain the human perspective. But Stephen Spielberg himself has already made films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and War of the Worlds, all films that focus heavily on the human perspective and all films that Disclosure Day borrows from. This doesn’t even take into account the myriad of other films about aliens made from the human perspective. One would think Mr. Spielberg would be interested in making a film that not only features aliens but is also about aliens.