When it comes to Steven Spielberg, you know you’re generally getting one of two things: a crowd-pleasing blockbuster or some worthy Oscar-bait. Disclosure Day, a return to the alien-centric plots of such classics as E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is firmly in the former camp, and seeing as I was in the mood for some of that, I picked up a couple of tickets to the Dublin IFI’s 70mm screening and dragged a friend along for a viewing. After all, Spielberg had already delivered two alien classics. I might have been well off to remember that both of those were delivered at the other end of his career, and his last really good crowd-pleasing blockbuster was 2002’s Minority Report (not a classic, but a very solid blockbuster).

My thoughts below, with more than a few spoilers.

First of all, the good stuff: the cast is top notch, with Emily Blunt and man of the hour Josh O’Connor sincerely and emotively playing the parts of people caught up in and trying to survive a vast conspiracy, and Colin Firth getting to chew a decent chunk of scenery as the main villain of the piece. There are also some genuinely thrilling set pieces, especially one involving a train, and the movie as a whole is solidly shot and good looking in a way that you’d expect from a director as seasoned as Spielberg, even if you can’t take it for granted in the current streaming age.

And, uh, that’s it. More may occur to me as I go on, but let’s move on to the negative points. This section will be a bit longer.

The problem with returning to previous artistic stomping grounds is that new work is inevitably compared to the old. And not only does Disclosure Day fall down when compared with Spielberg’s previous alien encounter movies, but it also completely fails to reckon with other movies that have since covered the subject, especially Contact and Arrival. In its clumsy swings at the large concept of humanity’s reaction to being confronted with proof of alien life (conceptually the heart of Disclosure Day), it doesn’t even reach the heights of a middling episode of The X-Files.

The point in the film when I knew I was going to have serious issues with it was when O’Connor’s partner Jane (played by Eve Hewson) threw out one of the most tired arguments for not revealing such a truth: that religious people would lose their faith en masse. As poorly grounded an argument as it might be, I’d be more inclined to take seriously if the film did: instead it gets referenced a couple of times and then handwaved away by a kindly nun, who assures Hewson that no, everything will be fine, as if she’d already thoroughly considered the idea, in case she ever had to reassure a parishioner on the issue.

This kind of half-hearted engagement with its own central concept is a recurring feature of Disclosure Day, (again, as poorly supported as it is, it’s the only coherent argument anyone throws up against revealing the existence of aliens to the world) and this may be down to the fact that while Spielberg came up with the idea, he farmed out the scriptwriting chores to David Koepp. Koepp’s screenplay mostly features Blunt’s Margaret and O’Connor’s Daniel haring across the American landscape (or at least that portion of it within a day’s drive of Kansas City) pursued by Firth’s sinister government-aligned corporate forces and eventually trying to meet up. However, Margaret is largely driven by compulsions she doesn’t understand, and O’Connor wants to reveal aliens to the world but is doing so at the behest of Colman Domingo’s mysterious Hugo, who explains nothing. There’s a lot of movement but nothing resembling a coherent central drive, similar to Elliott’s relationship with E.T. or Roy Neary’s obsessive need to understand UFOs and what happened to him.

Instead of engaging the audience, the script keeps them at arm’s length for most of the movie. Margaret, a weather presenter, finds herself gifted with supernatural empathy (which manifests as low-level telepathy and a compulsive need to tell people how to fix their lives, which is an odd definition of empathy), and finds herself compelled to seek out Daniel, a whistleblowing former employee of Firth’s corporation, who apparently has a preternatural understanding of math (I say apparently because it’s never shown in the movie, unless it contributes to his skill at plugging in USB drives the right way round first time). Their mutual escapades are guided by Hugo, an “enigmatic mastermind” who is also an escapee from the evil corporation but one who has managed, despite absconding at the same time, to arrange for an entire warehouse full of accomplices and a life-size replica of Margaret’s childhood home.

I liked that the movie starts in media res, with Daniel and Jane trying to evade forces led by Firth’s menacing Noah, but that alignment of audience and character then took far too long to plug into what meat the story has: in deference to Margaret’s ignorance and the need to keep back the big reveal of her shared history with Daniel, we are told next to nothing about it, and the resulting revelation, when it comes, has no impact. Instead we get a “by the way, this happened,” explanation and then something close to a Deus ex Machina to resolve a confrontation in order to get everyone to the actual ending, where someone can say the words “Disclosure Day” and thus fulfil some sort of contractual obligation with the movie’s marketing team.

I won’t say too much about the ending other than to note that while the movie has been almost entirely about Daniel and Margaret (while failing to set up their pasts and how key they are to the plot in any meaningful way), the climax then proceeds to cut away from them almost entirely for the last five minutes, only to then throw another largely unheralded surprise (yes, you can see it coming, but the film places no real weight on it, and offers no explanation) in an effort to tie a bow on the whole thing.

Walking out of the cinema, my friend and I were almost surprised at how bad the whole experience was. I’ve a lot of sympathy for anyone working to create art in the modern world, especially those who are trying to create art as part of a large team in a profit-driven industry. That even extends to Steven Spielberg, who has little to no need for my sympathy and has been wealthy and powerful enough to get any film he wants made for decades. This was clearly a film he wanted to make, based around a subject that clearly still means something to him.

However, that can’t disguise the fact that Disclosure Day is shallow, disjointed, and overly fond of keeping its audience in the dark when it ought to be working to build our engagement with its characters and themes. Solid central performances by talented actors can’t save it from falling very short of both the marks that Spielberg made decades ago and the marks that others have set in the years since.