Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, his eighth science fiction film and the first since Ready Player One (2018), is arguably what he originally intended Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) to be back when he was first developing it in the early 1970s. Disclosure Day, which was written by David Koepp from a story credited to Spielberg, appears to be a cobbling together of those discarded political elements, making it a kind of darker, more conspiratorial cousin to Close Encounters. Such is not the case in Disclosure Day, where the forces of obfuscation are centralized in the figure of Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), a scowling menace who runs Wardex, a private corporation that is contracted by the government to keep secrets secret. Thus, Disclosure Day is primarily an extended chase film, with Noah and his black-suited minions hunting both Daniel and Margaret as they try to connect with Hugo, who is strangely in the middle of a warehouse somewhere while what looks like the massive set of a residential home is being constructed in the background. From an intellectual perspective, Disclosure Day is a fascinating vehicle that revisits long-standing issues with the stressed dynamic between ordinary people and the powers that be, but it doesn’t quite catch fire, possibly because the characters never achieve much depth.