In “Disclosure Day,” Steven Spielberg Replays the Hits

It’s been nearly four years since we’ve had a new Steven Spielberg picture—an unusually long, but understandable, wait. Spielberg, though as nimble an entertainer as we’ve got, will turn eighty this December, and the halcyon overachieving years of “Jurassic Park” and “Schindler’s List” (1993), “Minority Report” and “Catch Me If You Can” (2002), and “War of the Worlds” and “Munich” (2005) seem far behind him. His most recent feature, “The Fabelmans” (2022), was the kind of piercingly confessional work that might have put a lesser filmmaker out to pasture (not that a lesser filmmaker could have made “The Fabelmans”). After digging deep into his formative memories—chief among them his childhood surrender to the movies, which would define him, and which he would forever redefine—where, exactly, could Spielberg go next?

The opening scenes of his new blockbuster, “Disclosure Day,” offer up a hilarious answer: a pro-wrestling match, of course, for a rejuvenating dose of adrenaline. It’s a more pummelling kind of Spielberg spectacle than we’re used to, and also a canny diversion; in the bleachers, a far more consequential clash of wills is secretly playing out. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a sharp-witted cybersecurity expert, plans to blow the whistle on the sinister non-government agency wardex, short for Waived Reporting, Development, and Extraction. His former boss, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), is determined to stop him from exposing the group’s secrets: namely, that alien life-forms exist, and that the agency has concealed evidence of their visits for decades.

Soon, Daniel has fled with his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), and a device loaded with incriminating evidence, which they plan to make public if Scanlon and his minions don’t kill them first. Explaining his Snowdenesque attack of conscience, Daniel insists that the truth isn’t proprietary but, rather, “belongs to eight billion people.” He’s not alone in his conviction. Several other wardex employees have also gone rogue, led by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who helps Daniel remain (barely) one step ahead of his pursuers. They also have a potent, if unknowing, ally in Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a meteorologist from Kansas City, Missouri, who abruptly finds herself over the weather. Delivering her morning report, she begins emitting guttural click-click noises, as if she’s been possessed by a Predator. What does this mean? And how, for that matter, can she suddenly read people’s minds?

Before long, Margaret and her nonplussed partner, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), are also on the run, and although the destination is uncertain, we find ourselves in vintage Spielberg terrain. The cross-country crosscutting is propulsive, and the many chase sequences are filmed with breathtaking agility; at one point, a car tussles with a freight train and loses, in predictable yet spectacular fashion. Spielberg shifts tonal gears with practiced ease, a sense of awe going hand in hand with an ebullient comic anarchy. An early confrontation between Scanlon and Daniel encapsulates these extremes: Firth has seldom looked more malevolently grizzled, whereas O’Connor, even under the direst circumstances, retains his elfin mischief. When you remember that both actors have played British royalty—Firth in “The King’s Speech” (2010) and O’Connor on two seasons of “The Crown”—their characters’ enmity feels even funnier. Not least among the inspired eccentricities of this American road movie is the fact that Spielberg has cast the major roles with English actors (plus Hewson, who’s Irish). This proves a particular coup in the case of Blunt, who here gets to merge her comedy and action chops within a more earnestly emotive register, playing Margaret as a fount of crackpot conviction.

Margaret, following her nutty North Star wherever it leads, would have been right at home in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), in which U.F.O. sightings make enraptured believers of a select few. But that’s hardly the only Spielberg joint that gets revisited. A reference to Roswell harks back to the extraterrestrial shenanigans of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2009), which, like this film, was written by David Koepp. (He also co-wrote “War of the Worlds,” another alien saga.) When Margaret begins using her telepathic powers, you might flash back to Agatha from “Minority Report,” spouting oracular warnings at every stranger who crosses her path. At times, the new movie recalls Spielberg’s journalistic thriller, “The Post” (2017), which likewise hinges on the dissemination of information that, the powers that be caution, would pose a grave threat to national security.

The real menace here isn’t the aliens—prototypically gray-green, pear-headed beings who, in our occasional glimpses of them, look vulnerable, even frail—but, Scanlon suggests, humanity itself, which is far too hubristic and divided to handle the knowledge of their existence. He and his wardex colleagues have turned this foul conviction into a self-fulfilling prophecy: for decades, they have subjected aliens to unspeakable acts of torture, and then hidden evidence of those abuses. You may well think of “E.T.” (1982), with its rather rosier vision of an outer-space visitor being held against its will. These close encounters, by contrast, have been anything but kind.

In February, former President Barack Obama made waves when, during an interview with the YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen, he said that aliens are “real, but I haven’t seen them.” (He later clarified, in an Instagram post: “I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”) Hours after the interview was posted, Donald Trump rebuked Obama for revealing “classified information”—then, not to be out-revealed, said that his Administration would release government files related to U.F.O.s and U.A.P.s, or unidentified anomalous phenomena. Last month, the Pentagon published a tranche of “new, never-before-seen” images, with the promise of more to come, though the initial evidence has been generally deemed too vague to be conclusive.

Reality, then, has provided its share of free publicity for “Disclosure Day,” but it might be equally fair to say that it has let the air out of the movie’s tires. The tread is a bit worn, in any case. Ostensibly set in the present, with many grim, furrowed-brow references to a Third World War on the horizon, the film plays like a throwback to summer entertainments from earlier decades—and not just because the title evokes “Independence Day” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” two foundational science-fiction blockbusters of the nineties. Koepp’s screenplay samples everything from the sinister government conspiracies of “The X-Files” to the crop-circle mysteries of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs” (2002). There’s even a certain nostalgia, verging on naïveté, in the prominent narrative positioning of Margaret’s Kansas City news station. It’s touching to think that Daniel and Margaret’s revolution might be televised— or that American broadcast news, a medium as existentially threatened as it is politically polarized, might turn out to be a vital, globally unifying force.

In the end, Koepp’s script exaggerates the best and the worst of how humans might respond to such a revelation, and Spielberg struggles to split the difference between paranoid-thriller cynicism and his usual mode of emotional uplift. That waffling ultimately strands “Disclosure Day” on a heartfelt yet fuzzy middle ground, with a generalized plea for cross-species understanding that, even bolstered by the reliable stirrings of a John Williams score, left me dispiritingly dry-eyed. Domingo’s Hugo, saddled with one of the movie’s windier monologues, argues for “empathy as an evolutionary advantage.” Rather more persuasive is a peripheral character, Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), a Catholic nun who articulates a benevolently progressive view of faith. The existence of extraterrestrial life, she insists, does not negate the existence of God; it confirms that God is, like the universe he created, infinitely greater than humans realize. (It could be the script’s most topical and intellectually provocative thread, given what the Times’ Ruth Graham has called the “unsettling theological implications” of Trump’s alien-data dump for the conservative Christians who form much of his base.)

Spielberg may be a self-professed agnostic, but he believes fervently in certain kinds of miracles, and his film overflows with technological signs and wonders. Scanlon’s most lethal weapon is basically a dental chair, albeit one that allows him to drill into, and control, the minds of his enemies. Margaret, at one point, acquires the ability to turn herself and her comrades invisible, a piece of Houdini-level trickery so pleasing that it threatens to transform “Disclosure Day” into the last thing it needs to be: a commentary on the magic of movies. The metaphor is sealed, I fear, by a bathetic sequence that guides a character into an exact replica of her childhood house—a film set, more or less—so that the traumatic events that once unfolded there can be excavated and exposed. “The Fabelmans” made a rich feast of domestic angst, but even an artist as innately self-reflexive as Spielberg shouldn’t merely repeat himself. Though “Disclosure Day” teems with intelligent life, it also blurs the line—not the one separating us from them but the one between phoning home and phoning it in. ♦