Review: In Steven Spielberg's 'Disclosure Day,' the aliens are here but the wonderment isn't

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Anticipation.Rumors.

Anxiously scanning the horizon, hoping that a brilliant force will leave the masses forever changed.Yes, a new Steven Spielberg movie about close encounters with extra-terrestrials is landing — and misses the mark.“Disclosure Day” is a story of truth and feared consequences.

A personality-free cybersecurity expert, Daniel (Josh O’Connor), is on the run with evidence of little gray men arriving on our planet to a rude reception.The aliens are kind.

Our species is barbaric.Wittily bruising us with that fact, Spielberg opens with a POV of a wrestler kicking the audience in the face.

Welcome to Earth.Elsewhere in America, a weathergirl named Margaret (Emily Blunt) breezes into her Kansas City studio, babbling up until the minute the news camera turns on, a bravura sequence that channels her restlessness, the station’s tempo and the film’s alarm that this ditz has just this morning been stricken with preternatural powers.(The cinematography and editing are by Janusz Kaminski and Sarah Broshar.) Locally, Margaret is known for announcing hailstorms with a sexy shimmy.

Suddenly, she’s fluent in Russian, Korean and telepathy.Although she and her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), are a bad match, she’s giving everyone else life advice like an intergalactic Dear Abby.

Movies If you want big popcorn fare from the best directors in the blockbuster game (Spielberg, Nolan, Ridley Scott), it’s here, along with a number of promising indie swings.When Margaret starts spouting alien-ese — spasms of gutteral clicks — on live TV, she and Jackson rush to the hospital for a brain scan followed by several suspicious men who claim to be with the FBI.Russell’s befuddled Jackson is as useless as a traffic cone but Blunt’s Margaret is a gas before the movie makes her go all glassy-eyed and solemn.

Yet, the movie is less inspired by why she was chosen or...