Full disclosure first: Steven Spielberg is my all-time favorite director and his 1977 UFO movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind is my all-time favorite movie.  And Jaws is a close second.  Some of us have been waiting for Mr. Spielberg to return to the skies for years and he has finally accommodated us.  Kind of.

Back in 1977, as I watched Close Encounters for the first time, I was in awe — and yet, my recollection is that I gave it a 2 1/2 star rating.  I vividly recall being miffed, or at least disappointed, that the aliens couldn’t have just met with the humans they had implanted their “vision” into.  I didn’t like the government being involved at all in the process and I felt that far too much screen time was spent on establishing their big mystery and then explaining the base at the foot of Devil’s Tower at the conclusion.  That feeling has never really left me, although I learned long ago to just let it go and focus on the brilliant parts of Mr. Spielberg’s alien opus.  Within a couple of more viewings, all in that first release period, I was at four stars and dreaming that I was Roy Neary, hopeful to embark upon the adventure of anyone’s lifetime.

Steven Spielberg’s new film (for which he supplies the original story) not only follows that same framework but ratchets up the governmental angle to cover up the biggest story in human history.  Essentially the film is a two-hour cat-and-mouse chase movie until the final twenty-minute revelation, wherein the depth and breadth of the coverup is finally made public.  Remember Jack Nicholson’s famous quote from A Few Good Men?  “You can’t handle the truth!,” he roars.  This movie is a moral question of whether that dictum is true or not, covering the entire world’s acceptance or total panic of the knowledge of real alien visitation.

One group of people in this film, the underdog rebels, argue for full disclosure to the public (once they have conclusive proof) and believe that full disclosure is in the best interests of everyone, regardless of any psychological consequences.  The other group is the conglomerate entity Wardex, in league with the Department of Defense, which has used alien technology for decades and doesn’t want to give up that precious power.  Their argument, voiced by head Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), is that total panic would ensue, society would disintegrate and chaos would reign.  You can guess where the movie’s makers stand in this argument, and I would argue that any rational person would want to know the truth as well, regardless.  But this is the film’s moral dilemma, made more urgent by the fact that military forces around the world are currently gearing up toward what characters fear will be World War III.

All of this secretive stuff and moral posing leads to a great deal of scurrying around, car chases, attempted abductions and such, all gradually headed toward Kansas City, where the final confrontation takes place.  Even then, the underdogs are trying to arrange an emergency television broadcast and the sneaky governmental and military types are trying to cut the power and prevent said broadcast.  Frankly it’s all rather tiresome, even when, bit by bit, some of the secret story is being revealed.  At the two-hour mark let’s just say that I was at less than three stars and growing ever more restless.

And then the patented Spielberg magic takes over.  The last twenty minutes of this movie are as mesmerizing as anything he has ever done.  The broadcast footage, most or all of which is fake, is amazing enough, but the way it is presented, as a live feed that more and more national stations are picking up, is incredibly effective.  People everywhere are glued to their phones, or their TV sets, watching history unfold in front of their very eyes, and being allowed to come to their own judgments about it.  To the director’s mind, it is a shared global experience of awe and astonishment, as people come to very quick grips with true evidence that we are not alone and the truth has been hidden for decades.  It’s an amazing final act of a story that may or may not be science fiction.  This final act ups my rating to a solid three stars and may well prove to rise when I see this again later, as I undoubtedly will.  Again, I wish that Spielberg’s alien friends would simply come calling to a small group of people without all this geo-political hubbub, but that’s just my dream.  His is grander and more complex and more exciting.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  14 June 2026.