‘Disclosure Day’ Review: Spielberg Plays His Greatest Cosmic Hits

Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” is one of those movies that sweeps you up from the start and rarely lets you down. A rollicking science-fiction adventure, it finds Spielberg revisiting a genre that he has populated with charming and horrifying extraterrestrials, genetically engineered dinosaurs and plugged-in psychics, and which has inspired some of his most popular and critical successes. The first time I watched the new movie, I scribbled I am having so much fun in my notebook. It was a nonsensical thing to write down as well as redundant. I didn’t need a reminder of the contact high that stayed with me after the credits.

Most overtly, “Disclosure Day” serves as a companion piece to “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the 1977 blockbuster which, two years after “Jaws,” solidified Spielberg’s status as a New Hollywood chart-buster. In the decades that followed, he began to broaden his horizons with self-consciously serious, weighty subjects in films that were greeted in some quarters as evidence of his maturity. Throughout, he also continued to return to science fiction, an elastic genre that allowed him to stick to familiar types, pet themes and narrative patterns even as he pushed himself yet further stylistically, technically and cosmically.

There’s a lot going on in “Disclosure Day,” story wise and otherwise, but its maximalism is coherent and strategic. It was written by David Koepp, a genre adept who’s provided Steven Soderbergh with some of his best recent material. Spielberg conceived of the story for this movie, which effectively plays out as a feature-length chase involving some likable, enigmatically connected people who are racing toward a shared destiny while evading powerful forces. As the race goes on, the movie veers between comedy and suspense, action and contemplation, the sounds of squealing tires mixing with sober interludes that touch on belief, reason, trauma, self-governance, the common good and higher powers.

The movie opens mid-chase with a skittish Spielbergian Everyman, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), fending off a phalanx of Spielbergian heavies led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), a smooth talker with a plummy accent and a raptor’s gaze. It’s night in the generic big city, and Daniel has a frightened woman at his side, Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), and a small mysterious object in hand that Noah wants. Daniel also has skills, and with some fast moves and nimble footwork he and Jane manage to evade capture in an S.U.V. It’s one of the first in a series of amusingly preposterous escapes that Spielberg orchestrates, and is in keeping with the perilous getaways that filmmakers have been perfecting since early cinema.