Disclosure Day: alien conspiracies, car chases and a jaw-dropping climax – discuss with spoilers

Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi blockbuster is a non-stop thrill ride, but did it convince you that we are not alone?

S ix months after a cryptic billboard reading “All Will Be Disclosed” popped up unannounced in Times Square, Steven Spielberg ’s Disclosure Day was finally released at global cinemas last week. The film sees the director returning to the sci-fi themes that have fascinated him throughout his career, braiding together multiple character storylines in an adrenaline-fueled – and occasionally dizzying – adventure. Read on for a spoiler-packed breakdown of the film’s themes, layers and Easter eggs, and let us know what you think in the comments.

Spielberg’s fascination with outer space dates back all the way to when he was a young boy. At the age of around five or six, his dad woke him up in the middle of the night to drive out to a quiet field near their New Jersey home, where father and son watched a majestic meteor shower light up the sky. The experience inspired to tell stories “not of this world”, sowing the seeds for his very first film, 1964’s alien invasion sci-fi Firelight, which Spielberg made for $500 when he was just 17 years old. He would later revisit the themes on a blockbuster scale with 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1982’s ET the Extra-Terrestrial , which broke away from depictions of aliens as little green boogeymen and – like Disclosure Day – shows them as complex and emotional creatures that long for connection and to be understood.

Disclosure Day has clear-cut heroes and villains from the jump. Among the good guys are Margret Fairchild ( Emily Blunt ), an ambitious and slightly ditzy weather girl who is given the ability to speak an alien language and see into people’s minds after she is visited by a red cardinal one morning (the bird turns out to be an alien in disguise.) Meanwhile, Daniel Kellner ( Josh O’Connor ) is a rebel who has defected from shadowy agency Wardex with decades’ worth of suppressed data about aliens. After serving jail time for cybercrimes, he’s set on sharing it with the public. “What I stole, it belongs to 8 billion people – the whole world,” he tells his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson).

But not if Noah Scanlon ( Colin Firth ), the Wardex top brass, has anything to say about it: he’s set on suppressing information about alien life in a bid to keep their technology for himself. (It’s best not to think too hard about how some of their gadgets and gizmos work.) Firth is silkily villainous here, and charming enough to get away with ominous announcements like “History doesn’t have a reset key” that could invite eye-rolls in actors with less gravitas. There’s no doubt as to his cruelty: the first time we see aliens in the film is when Kellner pulls up laptop footage of one poor creature on an operating table as Scanlon orders a vivisection without anaesthetic.

As the film zig-zags between characters, there’s an unambiguous sense that Spielberg is on the side of Fairchild and Kellner: I found myself wondering if the director was tipping his hat to real-world whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden , who faced harsh consequences for leaking government secrets.

Disclosure Day opens at a violent wrestling match and rarely lets up its whiplash pace, and it’s so artfully shot and framed that you rarely want it to. It’s heaps of fun to see O’Connor as a speed demon in an SUV – in a break from his subtler arthouse roles – and outwit an army of sinister goons in a jaw-dropping car chase sequence. Spielberg hasn’t delivered edge-of-your seat thrills like this since Minority Report. The actor is also at the center of the film’s most dazzling sequence, where a camera whips around him as winds rise to cover a cornfield with intricate crop circles. It may be a little too sentimental for everyone’s tastes, but I was also charmed by a flashback scene to Fairchild and Kellner’s alien abductions as children, as they are led to a Hansel and Gretel style house by extra terrestrials disguised as woodland creatures.

The cast is jam-packed with stars – Blunt, O’Connor, Firth, Hewson, and Colman Domingo as a zen mentor figure to the whistleblowers – and there isn’t a weak link between them. But the movie gets its biggest laughs and much of its emotional heft from Blunt’s attuned performance. After an encounter with villainous Noah Scanlon (Firth), he marvels at her super-human powers. “What is she?” he murmurs, as an associate answers him: “Unstoppable.”