Steven Spielberg’s spectacular career arc includes popular popcorn films like “Jaws” and “Jurassic Park” as well as more sober, serious cinema like “Lincoln” and “Saving Private Ryan.” But while the movies vary, there’s one theme he keeps returning to: the possibility (or probability, as Spielberg seems to see it) of extraterrestrial life.

He’s back at it in a big way on the big screen with “Disclosure Day,” nearly half a century after exploring extraterrestrials in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and 44 years after “E.T.” The basic plot, as the director told “CBS Sunday Morning” (no Spielberg spoilers from me!) “is about how, if somebody had the power and if somebody had the possession of the entire archive of visual evidence of what’s been happening for the last 80 years, what would happen if they decided to do a data dump across the entire world all at once? And what would be the behavior of the people who are trying to stop that data dump from happening — that is basically the core of this chase movie.”

As a chase movie alone “Disclosure Day” delivers, with the pursued protagonists who have the extraterrestrial evidence (an excellent Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor) tracked by an antagonist (a menacing Colin Firth) intent on keeping the secrets. But for sci-fi cinema to sync more deeply it requires a suspension of disbelief. And that’s made more likely by the real-world, genuine decline in belief, or trust, in institutions, a dynamic that drives conspicuous conspiracy theories as well, including ones about the government covering up proof of extraterrestrial life that are central to Spielberg’s story.

Data confirms the social corrosion: Gallup, tracking trust, recently reported that “Since 1973, confidence has declined across many institutions, including Congress, newspapers, television news, public schools, banks, the church or organized religion, and the Supreme Court.”

And while the decline is global, it’s intense in the U.S. “Americans stand out internationally for their pessimism about the nation’s political system,” the Pew Research Center stated in April, adding that despite the U.S. having the highest GDP of any of their surveyed countries, 77% of Americans say “the nation’s political system needs changes or complete reform.”

What’s driving the disconnect?

“It’s important to recognize that trust is a rational calculation; it’s not an act of faith,” said Brigitte Seim, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. “Trust is based on outcomes, and so one thing that’s going on is that trust is eroding because at least people’s perception of, if not the objective assessment of, government outcomes is eroding.”

This social erosion shores up “Disclosure Day’s” premise, since it makes it more plausible that officials have hidden the truth about alien encounters (let alone other issues) from the American public.

Seim said the public perception of mismanagement of issues like the 2008 financial crisis, immigration policy, COVID/immunization issues, Jan. 6 and beyond have exacerbated the trust deficit. Add dis- and misinformation and a “feedback loop between polarization and distrust, where polarization leads to gridlock and then gridlock leads to distrust and eventually it all just kind of boils over together.”

Whether this loss of trust in institutions extends to faith itself is less clear, especially since there’s a distinction: “Faith,” said Seim, “is something you believe regardless of evidence around you, and trust is something you believe because of evidence around you.”

Faith is a key theme of “Disclosure Day.” One of its key characters (played by Eve Hewson), who was once training to be a nun, hides out in her former convent, where she’s told by a contemplative nun (Elizabeth Marvel) that proof of alien life wouldn’t erode her faith. Spielberg himself told CBS that the movie “also takes the position of the church. What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have? Is God our God only on this planet? Or is God a god for every system where there’s civilization and intelligent life, and even developing life?”

Those theological questions are beginning to seem more real than rhetorical for some, including some conservative Christian pastors and podcasters profiled by the New York Times after a recent meeting on the eve of the Trump administration’s directive to release more government files related to extraterrestrial life. To some of them, including those who the Times story said didn’t see “neutral visitors from other planets or dimensions, but demonic entities,” there’s concern about believers’ reactions.

That worry is channeled in “Disclosure Day” when Colin Firth’s character warns, “The human race cannot accept what we know.”

But that’s not necessarily the case, said the Rev. Christopher Collins, the vice president for mission at the University of St. Thomas.

“Any new discovery,” said Collins, “can add to the wonder of creation, and therefore to the wonder of the creator, too.”

Beyond new discoveries there are also new inventions, including artificial intelligence, a force so potentially portentous that it’s the topic of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical letter, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.”

Leo’s treatise on magnificent humanity seems prescient. Because in spite of — or perhaps because of — the rise of artificial intelligence and interest in extraterrestrial life, there’s a countercurrent of interest in the fundamental nature of humanity, too.

Collins thinks “it’s been unfolding for a while in the digital age, and then the social-media age, and then with AI coming on top of that, and the rampant loneliness of people, especially young people.”

It “could be suggested,” continued Collins, “that the more destabilized things are, politically and economically and socially, there also seems to be an upsurge of people looking for faith or having something more solid to rely on.”

Including, perhaps, relying and focusing on each other.

“There may be an increasing fascination with the possibility of extraterrestrial life,” said Collins, “but it’s also very notable that there’s a whole lot of interest in terrestrial life, too. Questions like, ‘What are we really doing here? Who am I?’”

These profound questions don’t just resonate in the plot of the movie, but in the moving narrative of our own lives. And actually, in a case of life imitating art, in “Disclosure Day” and in our everyday, the humans — and humanity — seem even more mysterious, and indeed, magnificent, than the aliens.

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