Review: 'Disclosure Day' allows Steven Spielberg to raise a big question — what if we're not alone? — in an entertaining, thrilling package

Though not a direct sequel to his 1977 masterpiece “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” director Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” shows the veteran director still has deep thoughts about humanity’s place in the universe — and maintains the skills to transfer those thoughts into a rousing, thought-provoking entertainment.

Spielberg throws us into the action from the beginning, with shadowy agents threatening a man, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), in the stands at a pro wrestling match. Daniel has a backpack with memory chips the agents want. The agents, working for a shadowy defense contractor named Wardex and their boss, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), have Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), zip-tied in a van outside the arena.

Because of what’s in the backpack, Daniel is able to get Eve back, keep the backpack and escape the clutches of Scanlon’s operatives. The couple find a place to lay low — a monastery where Jane was once a novitiate — and then are taken to a safe house by people working with Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who’s got plans of his own.

Early on, Jane learns what’s in Daniel’s backpack. Daniel and Hugo, we’re told, worked at Wardex, where they discovered the big secret that’s revealed by those memory chips — video evidence, going back 79 years, of extraterrestrials landing on Earth. It’s a secret Hugo is convinced the world needs to hear, and one Scanlon will go to great lengths to keep quiet.

While this is going on, Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp (who wrote Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park”), working off Spielberg’s story idea, introduce us to Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a weather presenter at the NBC affiliate in Kansas City. She’s getting ready for work, chatting with her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), when a cardinal flies in the window. From here, Margaret begins acting oddly, speaking languages she claims not to understand and knowing intimate secrets of anyone she meets, from the cop pulling her over to her newsroom colleagues.

Then she rushes onto the set to deliver the weather forecast, and suddenly starts speaking in some strange clicking language. The video of this moment goes viral and Daniel sees it — and, unlike anyone else we’ve met so far, understands what she’s saying.

That may feel like a lot of synopsis, but actually it only covers the first 30 minutes or so, and it’s all covered in the movie’s trailer and ad campaign. I won’t go further into spoiler territory, except to say Spielberg and Koepp have created a road movie with a structure similar to “Close Encounters,” with people traveling across America trying to solve a mystery, pursued by quasi-governmental operatives trying to stop them.

Spielberg and Koepp are working here with some big ideas, like setting this story against a backdrop of global panic of an imminent nuclear war. Because Spielberg is who he is, with more than a half-century of delivering the cinematic goods, he can bring the scale and technical chops needed to tell such a big story. There are few directors working today who can command such resources — Christopher Nolan, and maybe Martin Scorsese on a good month — and know how to use them.

That said, not everything in “Disclosure Day” is perfect. The first half hour is a bit bumpy, as Spielberg and Koepp set everything into place. Blunt has the hardest road at first, saddled with some creaky character development to establish Margaret’s flighty personality, to contrast the serious things that happen later. Thankfully, Blunt is a gifted actor, and she eventually rights the ship with a performance that gracefully captures Margaret’s tenderness and resilience.

It’s significant to note that Spielberg was six months old when the first stories came out of Roswell, New Mexico, about debris supposedly from an alien spacecraft — so the question of whether we’re alone in the universe has hovered, like a UFO, over him and us ever since. In “Disclosure Day,” Spielberg doesn’t just tell us he thinks we’re not alone, but he makes viewers consider how that knowledge, whenever it finally comes out, will affect the 8 billion of us.

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‘Disclosure Day’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for action/violence, some bloody images and strong language. Running time: 145 minutes.