Steven Spielberg returns to familiar territory in disappointing sci-fi film, ‘Disclosure Day’

Emily Blunt stars in Steven Spielberg’s new film, “Disclosure Day.”

For a movie called “Disclosure Day,” Steven Spielberg’s latest still keeps a lot of secrets.

And the biggest one is: Why?

Of course, there are many other questions here, too. About the existence of a shadow government, run by the military-industrial complex. About faith and doubt and religion. About what would motivate a superior species to want to have contact with fearful, and violent, earthlings.

Admitted, “Disclosure Day,” opening June 12, doesn’t successfully address most of those questions, but maybe that’s OK. Ambiguity isn’t something Spielberg’s films generally acknowledge, and it’s nice to see the two make even a nodding acquaintance. But the biggest puzzler for me was one that the film never confronts, and maybe never even considered.

Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor in “Disclosure Day.”

Why tell this story at all?

Some people have called this Spielberg’s best film in 20 years, ranking it above works such as “Lincoln,” “Bridge of Spies” and “The Fabelmans.” It’s not. But you may think so if you are the kind of fan wondering, “Why can’t he make another one of those alien movies I loved when I was a kid?” The sort of diehard disciple yearning, not for another solid film, but merely another close encounter of the nerd kind.

And yes, “Disclosure Day” does deliver aliens — the same sort of skeletal, fragile, bug-eyed creatures Spielberg has famously given us before. And unlike the invaders of his “War of the Worlds,” they are the kind of gentle, “E.T.” creatures that, despite their vast intelligence, and our natural savagery, somehow think the best of us.

But even if this film fulfills Spielberg’s urge to get back to extraterrestrial territory — it’s his first sci-fi film in decades if you forget “Ready Player One,” and you should — it doesn’t have a real reason to exist.

The screenplay — written by longtime collaborator David Koepp, from Spielberg’s own detailed story — feels patched together, with scenes plucked from dozens of different drafts. Ideas are introduced, then dropped. Conflicts that are clearly meant to develop never do, while others appear nearly out of nowhere. Characters talk about outer space but have no inner lives. Dramatic rules are established (this is the way this device works) until it is convenient for them to be broken (but now it works this way, too).

Josh O’Connor in “Disclosure Day.”

What really works against the film is the distancing decision to tell the story in two, eventually intersecting narratives. In the first, Josh O’Connor is Daniel, a cyber-security expert turned whistleblower. He’s got a knapsack full of flash drives detailing nearly 80 years of alien landings — and 80 years of government experiments, autopsies and coverups. He is a walking file-cabinet of X-Files, and he has a team of murderous operatives on his trail.

The second thread is about a TV weather forecaster, Margaret, played by Emily Blunt. She’s had some vague trauma in her past, and a mostly useless boyfriend in her present, but everything seems to be going well enough for her. Until one day, she discovers she can read minds. And speak Russian. And Korean, And, it seems, whatever language it is that aliens chatter away in. And then that last fact gets out, and suddenly she is on the run, too.

Margaret and Daniel don’t know where they’re heading. But then they meet. And now, at least, they’re heading there together.

Too bad that — emotionally, at least — they never take us with them.

Of course, there are some amazing sequences along the way. There would have to be. Spielberg is one of the art’s preternatural prodigies, making ambitious films even in childhood and emerging as a fully formed, professional filmmaker while still in college (he never did graduate). You can feel his joy, after a long detour, to be back in genre, shooting action sequences again. There are several perilous car chases, and one breathtaking chase featuring a train, with each one achieving its power through precisely engineered editing.

Jersey film fans who claim the director as one of their own — he spent most of his grade school years here — will find plenty of sentimental links, too. Like many of his recent films, “Disclosure Day” filmed several sequences around the state, including in Morristown and Jersey City. The scene featuring a car crashing into a Cape May Seashore Lines train evokes a moment in “The Greatest Show on Earth,” a movie that Spielberg has always cited as a formative experience, and that he saw as a child at the now-defunct Westmont Theatre in Haddon Township.

Eve Hewson in “Disclosure Day.”

But those personal connections don’t carry over to the film’s characters. O’Connor is a fine actor who, as the cyber whiz, does convey an introvert’s awkward intensity. But he’s not particularly charismatic, or even compelling, as a lead character. (Nothing I ever expected to say, but I miss Richard Dreyfuss.) Daniel’s relationship with Jane (played by Eve Hewson) is so passionless, she seems more like a co-worker he just met than a lover.

Of course, Jane seems more like a plot device than a person. We’re told she’s a novitiate who never took final vows — an odd detail, but one necessary for the script to introduce its prime motivating idea: that if people found out aliens were real they would lose all faith in God. But would they, really? And would that be such an existential disaster? When Jane actually raises her obsessive worry with a nun, the good sister brushes it away as a non-issue. So what’s the crisis here?

Blunt has an easier time of it as the other protagonist, the suddenly gifted forecaster, playing one of those slightly frazzled but hugely sympathetic females Spielberg has loved since “The Sugarland Express.” Unlike O’Connor, Blunt has a role that requires her to dredge up a wealth of emotions, often seemingly out of nowhere. Her backstory is thin, and the mental powers she is suddenly gifted with are confusingly inconsistent. And when she lets her own mind run free, the best she can dream up are wide-eyed woodland creatures out of a Disney film (another Spielberg touchstone).

There are other questions here, some of which might have been answered by another draft, or an even longer film (although “Disclosure Day” clocks in at almost 2½ hours).

What does the crop circle we see have to do with anything? How does a North Korean crisis that seems to be just another news story become, almost immediately, the cause of an end-of-days panic? Why, if these extraterrestrials have such godlike powers, did they let themselves be captured in the first place — and never return to save the captive members of their species?

But those are minor puzzles compared to the major one: Why, instead of trying to make a great film, did Spielberg settle for making a collection of his greatest hits?

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