Steven Spielberg’s return to alien contact is, in the end, exactly what you’d expect from a summer tentpole: slick, propulsive, and never boring, even when it’s not saying much. It’s mindless entertainment in the best and worst senses of that phrase \u2014 the kind of movie that moves fast enough you don’t clock how contrived it is until you’re driving home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Emily Blunt is the reason to watch it. As Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist whose life gets upended when dormant alien conditioning triggers mid-broadcast, she’s asked to sell an enormous range in a short amount of time: confusion, terror, a kind of possessed otherness, and eventually a steady, almost messianic conviction. She does it convincingly enough to carry scenes that would otherwise feel silly on the page \u2014 full sentences of foreign languages spilling out of her, then collapsing into inhuman clicking, all while a studio crew looks on in horror. It’s a genuinely committed performance in a movie that doesn’t always deserve it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everything built around her, though, is by-the-numbers. Once Margaret’s broadcast goes sideways, the film clicks into a fairly standard chase-thriller shape: a shadowy agency called Wardex, headed by Colin Firth’s icy, self-justifying Noah Scanlon, mobilizes to grab her before she can talk. She’s paired off with Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), another childhood abduction survivor who shares a version of her gift, this one tuned to a mathematical “universal language” rather than spoken ones. There’s a girlfriend (Eve Hewson) who gets mentally hijacked into nearly turning on Daniel. There’s a rogue ex-Wardex handler (Colman Domingo) running an underground resistance out of a warehouse. And there’s the now-obligatory memory-recovery set piece, where Hugo’s team rebuilds Margaret’s childhood bedroom to unlock the buried memory of her and Daniel being taken as kids by aliens disguised as animals \u2014 a cardinal, a fox, a deer. None of this is surprising. All of it is competently executed and, in the moment, enjoyable, the way a well-made theme park ride is enjoyable. Firth is a serviceable, predictable heavy. The escape sequences and mind-reading rescues hit their marks. It’s craft without much risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Where the movie really loses me is in what it’s actually trying to say about disclosure. This is a film built entirely around the premise that humanity discovers, all at once, that we are not alone \u2014 and yet it treats that discovery as a single word shouted into a camera at the end, not as an actual reckoning with the scale of what “the phenomenon” would really involve. Decades of alleged cover-up get compressed into two people’s childhood abduction memories and one captive alien wheeled out for a finale. There’s no meaningful engagement with the breadth of what’s actually been reported and investigated over the decades \u2014 no craft retrieval program, no reverse-engineered technology, no acknowledgment of the sheer number of credible accounts that exist outside this one tidy origin story. It cherry-picks the most cinematic sliver of the subject and calls it the whole picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the ending compounds it. The film wants us to believe that one broadcast, one word \u2014 “Listen” \u2014 halts the drumbeat toward World War III and unites a fractured, cynical, algorithm-poisoned planet in collective wonder. That’s not a conclusion that follows from the evidence the film spends two hours establishing; it’s the conclusion Spielberg wants emotionally, dressed up as inevitability. A movie this committed to “realism” about government cover-up should have the nerve to imagine a messier, more contested reaction to the truth \u2014 not a group hug. It wants awe. It never earns disclosure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Steven Spielberg’s return to alien contact is, in the end, exactly what you’d expect from a summer tentpole: slick, propulsive, and never boring, even when it’s not saying much. It’s mindless entertainment in the best and worst senses of that phrase \u2014 the kind of movie that moves fast enough you don’t clock how contrived…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\n