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Spielberg and Koepp are very on-the-nose about O’Connor and Blunt’s shared close encounter standing in for repressed childhood trauma (Blunt calls it that even), and they follow Araki’s structure of two stunted kids being slowly drawn to each other and to confront this gaping hole in their memory/reason for who they are in the present. Both movies come to a head when the house where it happened finally fills in the gap (the ending of A.I. parallels in that scene knocked me on my ass). Obviously Disclosure Day diverges by making the aliens real rather than a coping mechanism, but even in the ending I feel Spielberg resisting simple wonder in favor of something close to what Araki arrived at: the comfort of finally finding the one person in the world who knows exactly what you went through warring against the bad feelings that can only be acknowledged and never forgotten or healed. I’m thinking, with both, about what the New York anchor says at the end of Disclosure Day, something like “I’m so sorry you have to see this along with me.” It’s important to discover these things but the hurting that follows can’t be easily translated into hope for the future.