Critic's Notebook

Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures

It’s perhaps fitting that the New York all-media press screening for Steven Spielberg’s latest sci-fi extravaganza, “Disclosure Day,” took place on an especially apocalyptic afternoon, one in which large swaths of Midtown Manhattan were effectively sealed off from the public because President Donald J. Trump had somehow decided that Game 3 of the N.B.A. Finals between the New York Knickerbockers and the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden was the ideal venue for a nap. Anticipating the inevitable disruption, Universal Pictures relocated the screening across town just four days beforehand. What the studio may have underestimated, however, was the depth of contempt the N.Y.P.D. appears to harbor for the public—and the degree to which the department seems to view its primary mission as protecting and serving the One Percent.

Before the descent of the Antichrist himself, news outlets reported a 15-block security perimeter around the Garden, supposedly stretching north to West 35th Street, east to Fifth Avenue, south to West 30th Street, and west to Eighth Avenue. As a demonstration of just how much the N.Y.P.D. dislikes New Yorkers, the actual area affected proved substantially larger. The M.T.A. had announced that the M34 and M34A, which normally shuttle crosstown along 34th Street, would instead run on 28th Street eastbound and 37th Street westbound. The driver of the M34 I boarded attempted to follow those instructions, only to discover that West 28th Street had also been barricaded. He ultimately diverted to 23rd Street. The return trip was even more absurd: my M34A was rerouted all the way to 57th Street, transforming a routine commute into a citywide scavenger hunt.

Back to “Disclosure Day.” By the time I arrived, I was already 30 minutes late. (Thankfully, two security guards informed me afterward that the screening itself had started behind schedule and I had missed only about five minutes.) Even so, there was something eerily seamless about walking directly from that clusterfuck outside into a film poised on the brink of a North Korea-instigated World War III, where Josh O’Connor and Eve Hewson evade capture by a paramilitary force while Emily Blunt clicks her tongue during the weather segment of a television newscast.

After being visited by a canary, Kansas City, Mo., weatherwoman Margaret (Ms. Blunt) suddenly becomes both a polyglot—a development that deeply unsettles her partner, Jackson (Wyatt Russell, son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn)—and a mind reader, a talent she casually deploys after being pulled over moments before she’s due on air. Elsewhere, Hugo (Colman Domingo) coordinates the escape of Dr. Daniel Kellner (Mr. O’Connor), who possesses both a cache of top-secret videos and a mysterious MacGuffin whose powers remain conveniently undefined until the plot requires otherwise. While waiting in a safe house for extraction, Daniel gently introduces Jane (Ms. Hewson) to the disturbing footage confirming the existence of extraterrestrial life. Meanwhile, Wardex chief Noah (Colin Firth) uses an identical MacGuffin to remotely manipulate Jane into concealing a kitchen knife in her sleeve, ready to stab Daniel at the dramatically opportune moment.

The film gradually reveals that Wardex is a private organization dedicated to suppressing public knowledge of the extraterrestrials while attempting to “reverse engineer”—a phrase David Koepp’s screenplay repeats with near-religious devotion—their technology. Chief among these discoveries is the MacGuffin itself, a magical all-purpose plot device capable of accomplishing whatever the story demands. It not only allows Noah to puppeteer another human being from afar, but later grants characters invisibility whenever the screenplay finds itself in need of a convenient escape route.

Mr. Koepp, who previously scripted Mr. Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park,” “The Lost World,” “War of the Worlds,” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” has delivered a screenplay that is, put simply, a hot mess. It juggles ideas about extraterrestrial life, the military-industrial complex, and impending global war without ever discovering meaningful connections among them. The film’s most ludicrous notion is that the existence of alien life must be concealed because it would cause humanity to stop believing in God. Yet “Disclosure Day” never commits fully enough to its own conspiracy-minded worldview to make even that premise persuasive. It gestures toward provocative ideas while remaining strangely timid about exploring them.

What the film does provide are a handful of competently staged action sequences. One standout finds Daniel and Margaret attempting to leap from a car onto a moving train before it passes another train heading in the opposite direction. Another involves Daniel and Jane leading Wardex agents on a high-speed chase. That’s largely the extent of the excitement. Even the extraterrestrials themselves—and the visual effects used to realize them—look spectacularly ridiculous.

One can’t help wondering why the studio bothered screening this in an Imax auditorium. After surviving the actual hellscape outside that day, nothing in “Disclosure Day” felt thrilling, awe-inspiring, or remotely relevant. Quite the opposite. Mr. Spielberg’s film unfolds in a fantasy of hypothetical dangers while remaining almost completely oblivious to the far more immediate threats already shaping the world beyond the theater doors. Compared to the reality that was awaiting audiences on the streets of Manhattan, “Disclosure Day” felt less like a warning and more like a steaming pile of bullshit.