Full disclosure: Spielberg’s latest a solid sci-fi outing

Steven Spielberg, who has been making feature films for over five decades now, is in “watch the skies” mode with his new sci-fi movie, a deliberately old-fashioned alien visitation story that is sometimes sinister, sometimes sentimental and often outright goofy.

There are callbacks to cinematic history and Spielberg’s own sci-fi oeuvre — especially E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Minority Report. There are expertly executed set- pieces and indelible individual images. There’s a whole lot of lens flare. These are things that Spielberg fans will expect.

But there’s also a valiant kookiness that’s surprising in a summer blockbuster. Disclosure Day can be thumpingly obvious and oddly disjointed, but it’s one of those movies that’s actually made better by its imperfections.

Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor from Wake Up Dead Man) is a math genius on the lam from Wardex, a shadowy corporation run by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, being suavely villainous). Daniel holds a cache of evidence showing alien contact dating back seven decades, which has been systematically covered up by Wardex, the Department of Defense and military contractors.

Then there’s Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt). She’s an upbeat, ambitious weathercaster for a Kansas City TV station — at least until an unusual encounter leaves her able to read people’s deepest fears and desires.

Finally, there’s Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), a would-be Wardex whistleblower who’s got his own mysterious project going on — what appears to be the meticulous life-size re- creation of a postwar suburban home.

These people are headed toward each other somehow, moving through a Spielbergian landscape of freeways, isolated farmhouses and roadside diners, driven by a Close Encounters-style obsession.

They’re trying to evade Scanlon and his corporate baddies, who dress in black and drive in scary, synchronized lines of black SUVs and sedans. Despite Daniel’s protests — “I’m not a field man!” — he and Margaret spend a lot of time involved in car chases, cliffside escapes and treacherous railway crossings.

In between the action, though, there’s a lot of talk. Daniel believes the truth about aliens “belongs to eight billion people.” His girlfriend, Jane Blankenship (Bad Sisters’ Eve Hewson), a former Catholic novitiate, suggests the sudden disclosure of extra-terrestrial beings could upend institutions and undermine faith.

This science-versus-religion debate feels forced, however. The script, by Spielberg and frequent collaborator David Koepp (Jurassic Park), is often serious without being profound, overly literal about some things and hopelessly vague about others, and it has plot loopholes you could drive a fleet of black SUVs through.

The story seems to take place in some version of 2026 — you get the feeling the world is on fire — but Koepp and Spielberg don’t seem to take into account the current environment of disinformation, “fake news” and AI slop that has warped our discourse, offering instead a touching, very non-2026 faith in legacy media. (One senses that some young person maybe had to talk Spielberg out of a scene involving citizens silently gathered in front of the window of a Main Street appliance store watching the network news on multiple televisions.)

Still, for all its problems, Disclosure Day has a tender sincerity, a genuinely hopeful humanism — “Empathy is an evolutionary advantage,” as one character suggests — and it’s carried by a committed cast.

O’Connor, as he did in Wake Up Dead Man, shows off his talent for supplying relatable moral grounding, and Blunt has never been better in a role that requires both show-offy technical stuff and deep, deep emotion.

The ending might be polarizing, especially for viewers hoping for that sense of the sci-fi sublime that powered Close Encounters. This film’s ultimate disclosure is deliberately lowkey and anticlimactic.

It works, though, in the odd, unexpected way the rest of the movie works.

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