There’s admittedly a little thrill of nostalgia involved in going to see Disclosure Day for those old enough to remember what it felt like to go see a big Steven Spielberg movie in June. It can be argued that with the colossal, groundbreaking success of Jaws, which opened fifty-one years ago this month, Spielberg became the director most responsible for the phenomenon of the summer blockbuster.

Spielberg followed that career-defining smash hit with another sensational crowd-pleaser, the sci-fi epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in 1977. Though he went on to make a number of movies involving aliens arriving on earth, including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and War of the Worlds (2005), it’s Close Encounters that’s the clear forerunner of Disclosure Day. Both films center around ordinary Americans who have initially terrifying encounters with aliens that so alter their lives that they become isolated from their families and communities. But they’re ultimately rewarded by spiritually transcendent contact with beings from outer space.

These beings are tremendously evolved, by the way, and apparently nice as hell once you get to know them.

In Disclosure Day, cybersecurity specialist and math whiz Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) has stolen a highly classified video footage archive from his bosses at the sinister Wardex Corporation, which has shadowy ties to the US government. It’s run by ruthless CEO Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), who’s had Kellner branded as a foreign spy at a time when the United States and North Korea are on the brink of World War III. Kellner plans to turn whistleblower, releasing to the whole world simultaneously the US military documentation of human-alien contact dating back to the notorious Roswell incident in 1947.

But first he’s got to escape Scanlon’s heavily armed “men in black,” who are hot on his trail, and find his way to the safe house of fellow Wardex whistleblowers, shepherded by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo). One complicating factor is that Scanlon’s goons have gotten ahold of Daniel’s girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) and are using that as leverage to force Kellner to give his backpack up to them. It contains digital archives of the all-important footage plus a mysteriously powerful alien object that’s the even more coveted contraband.

There’s a very good opening scene in an arena during a mixed martial arts match that starts with a point-of-view shot of a big foot stomping down, presumably on the face of the fighter on the losing end of the action. What was George Orwell’s description of fascism in his novel 1984 again? “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

It’s certainly a remarkable coincidence that Donald Trump’s command performance Ultimate Fighting Championship match was arranged to take place on the White House lawn the same weekend as the Disclosure Day opening.

The stadium is full of bellowing fans regularly leaping to their feet to cheer on the brutal action, and the only still spot in the audience is Daniel Kellner in a nondescript hoodie and a backpack, trying to remain unnoticed by being quiet, but becoming ironically noticeable that way. This is a reference to a simultaneously thrilling and amusing scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), in which one person in the stands of a tennis match becomes an unmissable focal point because his head is not turning rhythmically back and forth following the ball like the rest of the crowd’s.

Disclosure Day is full of such movie references, often to Spielberg’s own earlier films. For example, he restages a scene from his great debut Duel (1971), when the semi driven by a sinister trucker targeting a red sedan driver (Dennis Weaver) starts pushing his car toward an onrushing train. In Disclosure Day, Spielberg “takes that scene to its full realization,” as he describes it, by having a red car get pushed all the way into the racing train. Its mangled metal gets caught on the side of the train and dragged along the tracks spewing bits of steel as the car comes apart with Daniel and another shrieking passenger still inside. It’s the most armrest-clutching scene in Disclosure Day.

I won’t spoil how Daniel gets away from the Wardex goons at the MMA fight, but it’s only the first of a series of hairbreadth escapes. Disclosure Day, for much of its extensive running time of 145 minutes, is one long chase movie. And I like chase movies a lot, so I enjoyed much of the film, though it palls a bit toward the end — how many times can you watch twenty sinister dark vehicles race up to a new location and disgorge corporate goons ready to thwart our heroes? Spielberg comes up with escapes so implausible it’s hard not to laugh, such as when Daniel runs along a low open-slat fence behind an area swarming with highly trained professional killers, with no cover beyond some bare twigs, so he’s completely visible, if only one single agent would turn his or her head.

But the twentieth action scene is still better than the slow, talky, explanation-filled finale, when it feels like all the air is being slowly let out of the movie, leaving us with a flat tire at the end.

Daniel’s partner for much of the long chase is Jane, an ex-nun who “lost my calling but not my faith.” She is, at least initially, very much against his plan to reveal the truth about aliens to the world. What will such a revelation do to humanity, already roiled by an impending world war? What about the panic it will create among a big majority of the global population that believes in a traditional religious hierarchy with God at the top as the only supreme being?

And how can Daniel fully trust this woman once she reveals that she fundamentally opposes his mission?

It makes one groan a bit the way Jane, the Plot Device, seems planted there in order to catalyze this debate and provide a handy possible antagonist. There are some big weaknesses at the script level, most obviously the dud of an ending. Screenwriter David Koepp, who authored Spielberg’s War of the Worlds plus several Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones franchise screenplays, returned to work for Spielberg after several years of collaborating with the other famous filmmaking Steven — Soderbergh — on a series of modestly budgeted and generally well-received genre films (Kimi, Presence, Black Bag). Koepp’s got a big name, but he’s a very fallible and uneven screenwriter. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, anyone?

The other major character in Disclosure Day is Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a would-be journalist working as a “weather girl” on a TV station in Kansas City, Missouri. She’s got big ambitions to move beyond wearing tight dresses while pointing out meteorological patterns and doing a cute “hail dance” to celebrate her favorite form of precipitation. She wants to be a real TV news reporter — maybe — or at least in her restless moves from place to place, she wants to do something important that isn’t yet clear in her mind. Her musician boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell, son of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell), seems smiling and supportive but finds innumerable ways to undercut her aims.

And that’s before Margaret begins to develop very strange abilities. Suddenly she can speak fluent Russian and Korean, and from there she moves on to scary psychic gifts, able to read people’s faces and know all about them in impromptu encounters everywhere she goes. And then, during a live weather report, she starts speaking in tongues — or at least one completely unknown tongue that certainly sounds, in its guttural clicks and gurgles, alien.

It’s only a matter of time before she’s also on the run with men in black chasing her and one person echoing in her mind whom it’s imperative she find: Daniel Kellner.

Emily Blunt is given a very showy role here, designed to get her kudos. She’s British and has to go from flat Midwestern American accent to fluent Russian and Korean, from plausible weather bunny to aspiring, not-laughable news anchor, to psychic wonder woman. And she’s perfectly fine — not brilliant, but fine — and you find yourself rooting for her to bring it off. Very appealing, Emily Blunt.

But the greater performance is the quiet, soft, sensitive one by Josh O’Connor as a rather lost young man discovering unsuspected inner resources while risking his neck to oppose some of the worst power-wielding scum in the United States. How O’Connor manages it, I don’t know — he goes unobtrusively from film to film giving one great naturalistic performance after another. Here he has to pull off lengthy versions of those embarrassing dazed-by-awe shots that Spielberg has made into a signature in all his post-E.T. movies. I hate those damn shots. Some people like to see slack-jawed gaping while a John Williams score cranks up the ear-splitting heavenly music, but to me these scenes have always been emblematic of the part of Spielberg’s legacy that’s hardest to endure.

And poor Colman Domingo, a reliably excellent actor, is required to spew explanatory dialogue to keep it all working. This cast works hard and they’re very adept, so they can get away with quite a lot.

But really it’s an enjoyably big, fat, action-oriented Spielberg movie at the onset of summer, and we can really use one right now. Spielberg is nearly eighty, and he’s not the powerhouse director he once was. But then again, he hasn’t been that for most of his career. Spielberg hit his peak at the beginning, in the late 1970s, and he’s never matched it since. He’s made good, solid films since Duel and Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but in aligning himself to increasingly appalling 1980s-onward sensibilities, he lost his 1970s mojo.

A good example of this loss is a remark Spielberg made in an interview looking back at his career. He said if he’d made Close Encounters later in life, after he settled down with wife and children, he never would have had the Richard Dreyfuss character, blue-collar Indianan Roy Neary, leave his family behind to go off at the end with extraterrestrial beings, no matter how superior they were.

Which makes me thank the gods that it was young Steven who made Close Encounters. It’s the guts of that movie: the way Roy can’t move past the initial sublime encounter with aliens to resume an ordinary American Midwestern life, and the way his conventional, close-minded family and community shun him. Roy doesn’t actually leave his family, either. Led by his increasingly fractious wife Ronnie — played by Teri Garr in one of her great uncompromising performances — they leave him, peeling out of their driveway in the family station wagon, kicking up a cloud of dust and flying debris as they go.

But that’s a perfect illustration of what happened to Spielberg over the years. The tougher-minded young filmmaker of the 1970s, who was bolstered by the churning sociopolitical context of his era and the high level of intense, rough-edged, and realistic films for adults getting made all around him, got steadily slicker, soppier, and less daring.

Still, Spielberg had such remarkable filmmaking abilities from the start that most of them survived his shift in sensibility that had him navigating downward through the increasingly degraded twists and turns in the culture. This is why technically sensational scenes, memorably shot performances, inventive handling of mise-en-scène, marvels of gripping action goosed up by superb editing and inspired sound, are as much a part of Spielberg films as rank sentimentality, juvenile attitudes, and shallow pop-philosophizing. They’re all inextricable by now.

But what the hell. Spielberg is still Spielberg, a huge influence over our moviegoing lives in the USA, for good or ill. He won’t live forever, so might as well get out there and enjoy Disclosure Day while it’s still fresh in theaters.