Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is a close encounter of the hopeful kind

Emily Blunt plays meteorologist and former journalist Margaret Fairchild in Disclosure Day. (Supplied: Universal)

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.

What: A whistleblower and a meteorologist race to reveal the truth about a vast government cover-up of alien life.

Starring: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo, Eve Hewson

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.

Disclosure Day is Steven Spielberg's gleeful return to the extra terrestrial. (Supplied: Universal)

How do you astonish an audience when anything is possible, and nothing is real?

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.

Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) is a whistleblower with nothing to lose. (Supplied: Universal)

Sm