Like many of my generation, I grew up with Steven Spielberg films at every point of my childhood right through to adulthood. From Jurassic Park expanding and shocking my young teenage mind, through the likes of E.T., Jaws, Indiana Jones, Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report, Schindler’s List, The Fabelmans and – notably in the context of this new release – the enduring Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s as if his movies are a family friend, something embedded, often naturally emotional, with hits of thrills and surprises layered into every scene.

Created and directed by Spielberg, with the screenplay by David Koepp, Disclosure Day arrived with elevated expectations and I have to acknowledge that, and when you consider his back catalogue, that’s a ridiculously high bar. Pre-release marketing has been exciting, just enough teasers to keep it fascinating; The basic premise around government secrets and a literal universal attachment to beings beyond our planet. The tagline itself is “If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? This summer, the truth belongs to seven billion people.”

Now, I’m no stranger to extraterrestrial adventures and as a fan of The X-Files, we’ve got a similar setup where Josh O’Connor’s Daniel Kellner is a cybersecurity expert, who has stolen secret government information about human-alien dating back some 80 years, and also has extraterrestrial tech. His role is to get it to a larger team, led by Colman Domingo’s Hugo Wakefield, who’ll help reveal those facts to the world. Trying to stop him is Colin Firth’s baddie with an anger issue Noah Scanlon; CEO of a clandestine government administration who have been hiding the info for decades.  

While O’Connor’s Kellner thinks he’s a key factor in this fight for full disclosure, as well as a whistleblower support team, there’s someone else who’ll also become part of the reveal but even she doesn’t know it yet. Over in Kansas, Emily Blunt’s TV meteorologist Margaret Fairchild is having a normal day, with her naïve boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell having dumb fun), when a Northern Cardinal bird flies into her home, stares at her for a bit and a psychic connection is activated which, in turn, awakens her ability to interact with anyone in any language, and she also instantly knows every single thing about them. Blunt is superb; she’s the pure essence who feels relatable and likeable all-in-one. Later on in the film, there’s moments when she’s ‘connecting’ with characters and it’s a beautiful thing to witness, her performance keeps you in the story throughout.

After outlines, we launch into the main story, that of Fairchild and Kellner trying to get the secrets of extraterrestrial visitations out to the globe, while being hunted by Firth’s Scanlon who’ll do anything to try and stop them, including putting himself inside the psychic ability of the aliens whose tech he has infiltrated. There are other sub-plotlines about why, but you get the gist of it.

When Disclosure Day is in flow, it’s fun with big set pieces, quick quips and moments that homage Spielberg’s directorial history, but when it jumps between the action and more serious slices, regarding the ‘right’ for people to know, the balance doesn’t always come off with full believability. There’s also a high percentage of people basically on the phone, which becomes a little strange once you notice. As a whole, Spielberg wants to give answers to his build-up but is it needed? However, where it succeeds is with the cinematography from Janusz Kamiński, as well as excellent set pieces that range from O’Connor’s Kellner stealing a car and driving through a house, through to a chase sequence, in which the camera fluently floats in and out of the action, to a train sequence that slips into Indiana Jones territory, and then an ‘invisible’ house situation which felt a little Christopher Nolan. Yet for all the ups, the downs are oddly off-kilter.

For me, it felt like a spiritual sister to Close Encounters of the Third Kind as Spielberg plays homage to his past in both pacing and content. For this, the Close Encounters vibe is mostly keenly felt not only in an early farmhouse scene, but also with Josh Connor’s Kellner in his motel room, where a conversation is filmed off-centre and the lights that fill the room tribute the unknown of the lights that surround the house before Barry escapes outside to see ‘toys’ in the 1977 film.

In Disclosure Day, the biggest issue for me is the final third, where those aforementioned answers are central but feel the least original of the process. There’s a big reveal sequence that regrettably drags, as you can see the point, but the emotional nature is lost amongst the details, and I’m not entirely sure it fits ‘now.’ My counterbalance is that maybe the film is targeting a fresher audience, or those who’ve forgotten how vital ‘connection’ is – but that’s a difficult idea to validate when a sizeable portion of the film is people talking to each other via telephone.

In a wider sense for Disclosure Day, we’re in an era of misinformation and this is why explorations back into the human desire to feel connection have returned on the big and small screen, and often in the guise of hoping something beyond us will come to save us. However, one thing is absolutely true, and it’s that Disclosure Day is deep in empathy and holds a core message about listening to each other, because that might actually save us from ourselves. Whether aliens will have any involvement in that reality happening, I’m less sure, but if you’re willing to switch off your believability brain for this adventure, then you’ll nevertheless have an entertaining time.

Disclosure Day is in cinemas now