Steven Spielberg returns to sci-fi and alien wonder in his thrilling Disclosure Day

Nearly 50 years ago, Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind took the trope of hostile space invaders and, vibing with new-age 70s spiritualism, transformed it into a vision of benign cosmic travellers arriving in disco-baubles of sound and light.

In 1982's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial — still one of the highest grossing movie of all-time, accounting for inflation — the director gave us a Christ-like alien as tear-jerking monocultural event, smuggling inter-species empathy onto lunch boxes and into living rooms around the world.

Flash forward to today and, with the planet siloed away in self-absorbed bubbles of misinformation, it's hard to imagine anyone looking up from their devices long enough to notice a UFO descending to Earth, let alone believing that an intergalactic visitor was stepping down the gangway.

It's a challenge that Spielberg's new sci-fi thriller Disclosure Day — inspired in part by a New York Times piece on the Pentagon's secret UFO program — faces, both as a story and as a mass-entertainment cultural product.

Something of a spiritual third chapter to a trilogy began with Close Encounters and E.T., this taut, terrific new film represents both Spielberg's return to sci-fi and big-ticket wonder. The film lays all of his loopiest career beliefs — aliens, telekinesis, unabashed hope — on the table in a moment when cynicism and disbelief are running amok (or, as The Screen Show's Jason Di Rosso quipped to me: "Stoner Spielberg is back.")

As a wake-up call to humanity, it throws down with what might be the funniest opening shot of Spielberg's career: a wrestler putting his thigh-high boot down on the camera, squarely into the audience's face. Ringside at the match is Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), a government whistleblower on the run with his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), a mysterious device, and a backpack full of stolen secrets — 79 years of footage, to be exact, which exposes a government conspiracy to deny the presence of aliens on Earth.

Smouldering on their tail is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), a shadowy paramilitary spook hell-bent on stopping the information link he fears will up-end humanity's existence. His former colleague turned defector, Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo, doing a beatific 180 from his tyrannical Joe Jackson), is determined that the public know the truth.

Meanwhile, Kansas City weather reporter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) suddenly starts speaking foreign languages, reading the thoughts of those around her, and clacking in an otherworldly voice on air, sounding as though the cackling marauders of Mars Attacks! had gone to alien finishing school.

Blunt, who's sensational, deserves an Oscar nod for the scene alone.

That it all plays out against the backdrop of a looming, vaguely defined global conflict almost feels like Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park) engaging in their own game of blockbuster distraction.

After all, the Trump administration's recent "disclosure" of UFO files was suspected of being diversionary tactic during the US war on Iran, an invasion itself seen by some as an attempt to evade domestic political scandal.

Either way, it feels like the first time since 2005's dark 9/11 parable War of the Worlds (also penned by Koepp) that Spielberg has felt this hungry to engage with the moment.

As he sees it, it's a world in which empathy is in short supply, and we might again have to look to our galactic neighbours for some lessons in how to get along.

Not that Disclosure Day isn't playful, or even deliriously strange — quite the opposite.

The film crackles and hums with Spielberg's unmatched formal elasticity, jazzed by a visual language in which the truth of an image — menaced by screens and reflections — is in constant peril. There's an incredibly tense moment of psycho-kinetic manipulation, and a riotous sequence at a railway crossing (one of the many Close Encounters nods) that's as good as anything in recent action cinema.

For all its kinetic pleasures, it's the moments in which Spielberg returns to his signature sense of wonder — and not in a hollow, nostalgic sense — that prove to be the film's most affecting.

Without spoiling the sequence, there's a scene involving the recreation of memory as portal that taps into the locus of Spielberg's work, where the fabled childhood bedroom is both a place of familiarity and a fabrication — not unlike the alien mecha reimagining the robot-boy's past in A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

What moved me most wasn't so much Spielberg's revisitation of childhood, both his own and the one he cultivated in audiences, but his belief in the abductees whose experiences are historically dismissed as crackpot ravings; those who have — as a line in the movie goes — been punished for their ability to be astonished.

There's something very earnest and matter-of-fact about his big alien reveal, which wouldn't look out of place on one of those "Take Me To Your Dealer" T-shirts or Spielberg's goofball Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull; it's as though the film was determined to reclaim the imagery because yes, it's real — and no less ridiculous or imagined than, say, a god-man dangling from a crucifix.

If Disclosure Day lacks surprise, or even the kind of climactic fireworks with which Spielberg made his name, it's almost because he's been telling us this stuff all along. And the spectacle, in this case, is the message.

For some, the film's sign-off — a sentiment so simple that it's hard to believe it needs to be stated — will register as corny, even naive, but I was moved by Spielberg's conviction, his commitment to empathy as a kind of intergalactic superpower.

This one's for the true believers.

Disclosure Day is in cinemas now.