DisclosureDay

Steven Spielberg has been making films about people looking up at the sky for fifty years. Disclosure Day is the one where somebody finally decides to tell everyone what is up there. Josh O'Connor plays a cybersecurity expert who finds proof that alien life exists and that his government has known for decades. He does not want money and he does not want revenge. He wants to show the whole planet at the same moment, because he believes the truth belongs to all of us. Then people start trying to kill him.

That is a very simple engine for a film, and for an hour it runs beautifully. Everything hangs off one question. If you could prove it, would you tell people, and could you handle what they did next? The problem is that the film does not trust the question enough to sit with it.

Emily Blunt is the reason to watch

Emily Blunt plays Margaret Fairchild, a television meteorologist who starts experiencing things she cannot explain, including losing her voice live on air. She is extraordinary in this. There is a look she does, somewhere between terror and wonder, that carries the entire middle of the film.

Spielberg has always been good at putting ordinary people in front of impossible things. Roy Neary building a mountain out of mashed potatoes. Elliott meeting E.T. in the shed. Blunt belongs in that group. She makes you believe she is actually seeing it.

O'Connor is good too, quieter and more nervous, and the two of them together give the film a human centre that a lot of modern blockbusters simply do not have. Colin Firth, Colman Domingo and Eve Hewson round it out, with Domingo especially good in a small part.

The old team, still the best in the business

Janusz Kamiński shoots this like nobody else can. Light comes into rooms in this film the way light comes into rooms in Close Encounters, which is to say it feels like a living thing. John Williams wrote the score, and it is one of his best in years. There is a theme in the second half that will follow you home.

The action is real and clear. You always know where people are and what is at stake. It sounds like a small thing. Watch any other blockbuster this year and you will realise it is not.

Where it gets crowded

David Koepp's script is carrying far too much. Government secrecy, the media, faith, trust, why people cannot agree on anything anymore. Any two of those would have made a strong film. All of them together means none gets the room it needs, and there are long stretches where the film stops moving so a character can explain the theme out loud.

The ending is the bigger problem. Spielberg spends two hours asking enormous questions and then answers them in a way that is much warmer and much simpler than what came before. Warmth has always been his instinct and I do not hold that against him in general, but here it feels like the film gets nervous about its own ideas and reaches for comfort.

There is also a visual idea in the final act about how the aliens present themselves that tips over into silly, and it is the weakest effects work in the film. It arrives at exactly the moment the story needs you to believe.

Should you watch it

Yes, and on the biggest screen you can find. Even at its most overloaded this is a proper original science fiction film, not a sequel and not based on anything, made by people at the absolute top of their craft. That is rare enough now to be worth your evening on its own.

Just do not go in expecting a late career masterpiece. The first hour promises one. The last forty minutes settles for something much more ordinary, and that gap is what stops a very good film from being a great one.