When Steven Spielberg made Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), extraterrestrial life forms were a dining-table conversation, shrouded in mystery and wonder. As his latest venture Disclosure Day releases, aliens, ‘unidentified flying objects’ (UFOs) and deep-state military complexes unfortunately appear more often in the message boards of alt-right conspiracy theorists – folks caricatured beyond redemption in popular culture. This is the first significant difference between the two Spielberg films, released 49 years apart, which might dictate the latter’s reception.Another thing working against Spielberg’s latest film is that it comes a decade after Arrival (2016), directed by Denis Villeneuve. The Amy Adams-starrer, based on humans making first contact with extraterrestrial beings, managed something rare: being both deeply philosophical about the human condition while also being a definitive anti-Spielberg film, with its devastating, open-ended climax prompting more questions than answers.Spielberg, who is now nearly 80, having worked through six decades while balancing artistic integrity with blockbuster box office, has always been the future of Hollywood. In Disclosure Day, he sounds like a hokey voice from the past. It is a hard realisation as for someone considered to be probably among the 100 smartest, most naturally-gifted people to ever set foot on a film set, it is slightly embarrassing that he is unable to read the room. “Has he lost his edge?” – a natural question to emerge as one leaves the theatre. Maybe it is a misfire only because of the high bar the veteran filmmaker sets for himself.Disclosure Day fuses many of Spielberg’s favourite genres: the whistleblower film (The Post), hard sci-fi (Minority Report, AI) and the alien film (Close Encounters, E.T.). The film begins with a Hitchcockian sequence, where cybersecurity analyst Daniel Kellner is supposed to drop off pen-drives with material from a shadowy organisation called WARDEX, a seemingly big tech-cum-defence contractor company like what Palantir appears to have become recently. Unlike recent films, which have caricatured tech gazillionaires, Spielberg makes a more straightforward, old-school choice with Colin Firth playing Noah Scanlon, the ‘villain’ of the story, trying to prevent Kellner from publishing the data he has absconded with. A still from ‘Disclosure Day.’In Kansas City, local television weather presenter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), is leading a fairly suburban existence with her boyfriend Jackson (a hilarious Wyatt Russell). One day, when a red cardinal flies through her window, she conjures a mystifying ability to speak languages she does not know. She converses in Russian with Jackson, who is taken aback at first. When she reaches the studio and speaks fluent Korean to a guest, her crew is baffled yet impressed. However, the cherry on the top comes when, during a live weather show, she starts making rhythmic noises from her throat, shortly after which she collapses. Margaret and Daniel are ‘the chosen ones’ to bring out a secret, which we learn about in due course. It is in the Margaret plot line that we see some vintage Spielbergian touches, where he balances the high and low arts. As WARDEX’s security chases Margaret, Spielberg mines the situation for some comedic flourishes between her and a hysterical Jackson. A scene where the film pauses to properly destroy an iPhone (much to Jackson’s dismay) by driving over it before a hi-speed chase sequence feels like a very deliberate choice. Blunt, a fantastic actor in her own right, darts through the early portions of her role in the film. It is only much later that she becomes relatively still. O’Connor, on the other hand, is serviceable in the role of the anxious whistleblower, surprising himself by making the difficult choice each time. There is a great unbroken take that follows Kellner over a farm fence, inside a Dodge and then driving straight into a house to rescue his girlfriend Jane (an effective Eve Hewson). It is in these sequences where one senses the glee on Spielberg’s and his cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s faces. These are the analogue pleasures in an increasingly digital world featuring AI-enhanced computer-generated imagery (CGI). The veteran filmmaker is still more than competent to land a big action set-piece; however, other filmmakers like Sam Mendes and Alfonso Cuarón have taken the Spielberg sequence and pushed it to greater heights. Good enough may no longer be good enough.A still from ‘Disclosure Day.’Disclosure Day might be a passable film in the filmographies of most directors working today, but it is slightly below par for a film bearing the cross of ‘directed by Steven Spielberg.’ One of its glaring problems is its central question: who does knowledge belong to? In a world already submerged in too much information, does it make sense to unveil all truths? If I were to venture a guess, Spielberg is batting for ‘yes!’, convinced it would not make the world any more chaotic than it already is. It does not feel like a rigorously thought-through response. The Spielberg schmaltz used to work till 20 years ago, but the way he acquits Scanlon’s root of evil with a dead spouse feels like a phoned-in plot point. Written by veteran David Koepp, who did compelling work with Steven Soderbergh in the last couple of years, the film sees his canvas blown up to the sky here.Much of the mystery here is merely withheld information, which becomes laborious in a 145-minute runtime. When the climactic revelation does come, it turns out to be nothing nearly as earth-shattering as what we have not already come across in a conspiracy reel at 2 am while doomscrolling. Far from his best work – however, in the age of frictionless perfection, there is something oddly reassuring about watching Spielberg get it wrong.*Disclosure Day is playing in theatres.