Disclosure Day is a disappointment in the most frustrating way: the movie had everything and did nothing with it.

The plot is, in essence, the evergreen template in UFO fiction. A cybersecurity expert turned whistleblower uncovers proof that the government has been concealing alien life for decades, running covert experiments from classified facilities while the rest of humanity is stonewalled. He is hunted, finds an unlikely ally and the truth, we are told, belongs to everyone. If this sounds familiar, it is no accident — it should. It is the foundational mythology of every UFO conspiracy thriller from The X-Files onward and Spielberg does not interrogate it, subvert it, revisit it or deepen it. He simply executes it, competently, expensively and without surprise. The only difference is the plotline.

The movie’s most damning scene arrives near the end, when the two central characters are brought face to face with an alien and engage in direct communication with it. Intended to be the emotional and narrative climax, it is deflating in that it lacks restraint, which Spielberg once masterfully deployed. In Spielberg’s greatest alien works, the unknown was palpable, glimpsed, suggested. Here, the alien is a prop, the mystery dissolved in a single scene of dialogue.

The supernatural elements throughout suffer from the same problem. Blunt’s character develops an inexplicable ability to communicate in any language and intuit private details about strangers — and the movie does, to its credit, attempt an explanation. In a flashback sequence, a young Margaret Fairchild (played by Blunt) is followed into her room by animals, who lead her to a strange fairy-tale cottage in the woods. Inside, she and a young Daniel Kellner (played by Josh O’Connor) are subjected to some form of procedure that, we are to understand, is what grants them their abilities.

The Hansel and Gretel imagery could have worked as deliberate uncanny strangeness, the kind of dream-logic that lives between horror and wonder. But the film cannot decide what register it is operating in. It is too earnest to be surreal, too random to be meaningful. The result is odd. Worse still is a moment in which the adult Daniel Kellner, watching the scene from the side, attempts to intervene, screaming helplessly at the young Margaret Fairchild, unable to change what has already happened. The echo of the bookshelf scene in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is unavoidable. But where Nolan’s version devastates, because the film has spent two hours building the weight of that father-daughter relationship, here the anguish is asserted without foundation. The emotion has not been earned, and the borrowing only sharpens the sense of how far short the movie falls.

Colin Firth’s villain compounds the issue. He is a corporate antagonist drawn in the broadest strokes: sinister, powerful, power-hungry. There is nothing behind the performance that Firth is given to work with and the result is a character who functions as an obstacle rather than an argument. He lacks a meaningful internal logic.

There is one moment Disclosure Day that gestures at genuine depth. Elizabeth Marvel’s Sister Maura, a Catholic nun who provides sanctuary to the two protagonists, is given a brief but memorable scene in which she addresses what confirmed alien existence would mean for religious faith. Her central claim is that humans are God’s creation on earth; that the existence of life beyond it does not discard that teaching but rather expands it. God, she suggests, is larger than humanity’s conception of him. It is a compelling proposition and Marvel delivers it with quiet authority. For a few minutes, Disclosure Day becomes the film it could have been: one that wrestles seriously with the civilization-altering implications of its own premise. It deserved a full arc. Instead it is raised and sidelined within minutes. That Spielberg identified this question, gave it to one of his strongest supporting players and then chose not to pursue it is incredibly telling.

What saves this movie from being a write-off is Emily Blunt. She is, simply put, outstanding. In a role that could easily have been passive, she brings an emotional precision that elevates every scene she is in. The confusion, the fear, the resolve: Blunt portrays each register with a specificity the script does not earn. She is doing the movie’s work for it, and largely succeeding.

The harder question is what Spielberg was trying to say and whether he knew. He has now made several movies about alien life and across all of them there is a consistent belief that we are not alone and that encounter with the unknown is, ultimately, a transcendent rather than a threatening experience. Disclosure Day nominally operates within that worldview. But where Close Encounters earned its wonder through two hours of obsession, dread and longing, and E.T. grounded it in a child’s grief, Disclosure Day asserts it. The emotional journey is prescribed rather than felt. We are told the truth belongs to everyone. We are not made to feel why it matters.

In the end, this is the movie’s indictment: not that it is bad, but that it is insufficient. Spielberg assembled the best available cast, score and collaborators; inherited a premise that the current political moment had primed audiences to receive; and produced something that would have felt dated thirty years ago. Disclosure Day does not fail because it is clumsy. It fails because it is comfortable; comfort, in a movie about humanity’s most destabilizing possible truth, is unforgiving.

There is something almost cynical about the movie’s relationship to its own material: rather than grappling seriously with what alien disclosure would mean, Disclosure Day flatters the conspiratorial imagination: the covert facilities, the government cover-up spanning decades, the lone truth-teller against the machine. It is a movie built to validate those who already believe, not to challenge or illuminate anyone.

The overwhelming feeling, walking out, is not anger but impatience. This movie needed more time, more courage, more conviction. Disclosure Day feels exactly like what it is: botched, cheesy and hasty.