With Earth on the brink of World War III, Doctor Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), a cybersecurity specialist, has stolen classified material from a secret U.S. government contractor called the Wardex Corporation. Included are an artifact of extra-terrestrial technology and video of extra-terrestrial contact dating all the way back to the Roswell Incident. The CEO of the company, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) confronts Kellner and threatens him with an alien device. He escapes with his girlfriend
Jane Blankenship (Eve Newson) to hide her in her former convent.
In Kansas City, NBC meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) has psychic abilities that suddenly cause her to speak in tongues, that is, in an alien language. The broadcast goes viral and Wardex Corporation hears of it. Their agents, posing as the FBI, approach her and she flees from them. Wardex has been experimenting on captive aliens and reverse engineering alien technology. When Daniel hears Margaret, he understands what she said because he heard it as English. Scanlon uses an alien device to telepathically force Jane to attack Daniel and the fugitives are tracked to a motel.
Before Daniel is captured, he helps Jane escape with the device and she can locate Daniel at a black site. But he is captured again. They escape when she uses her powers to control their captors and force them to let the pair go. This is a lovely scene that makes me think of "These are not the droids you're looking for." They are pursued and, in an amazing action scene, forced to drive their car into a moving freight train, but they climb on board the train and escape.
They contact Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who has a team of former Wardex employees who want to reveal the truth about the aliens. They have reconstructed Margaret's childhood home to help her access her suppressed memories. It seems she and Daniel were abducted by aliens—appearing as friendly animals—when they were children and given alien powers. Margaret, Daniel, and Hugo's team enter the TV station to broadcast the truth. All the alien contact videos are uploaded to the Internet. This is Disclosure Day, and Scanlon gives up trying to hide the truth which, ahem, is out there. The human war-preparations stop. An ET is brought into the station and broadcast to the world.
The film was directed and produced by Steven Spielberg from David Koepp's screenplay. John Williams did the music, his 30th score and probably the last for Spielberg. The film received positive reviews from most critics and grossed over $200 million. Spielberg had been inspired by a New York Times article called, "Glowing Arms and Alien Sitings." Emily Blunt was told not to worry about speaking the alien language properly because it would be replaced by AI, but she did the scene perfectly in one four-minute take.
Janusz Kaminski was the cinematographer. He had been working with Spielberg for years. The car-train crash was real and actor Henry Lloyd-Hughes crashed the car himself. Rotten tomatoes gave the movie 74 points out of 100. It was praised for its mystery and fast-paced excitement, but received some disappointed reviews. There seems to be a small industry of finding things to complain about in this movie, most of which would have made many scenes or even the entire effort unnecessary. A common criticism is that it failed to add a third movie to the perfect Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and E.T., the Extraterrestrial.
But it was still a puzzling, thrilling, funny, thought-provoking film. In the beginning one does not understanding what is happening, but one quickly picks it up and it bombards you with the action scenes, evil conspiracies, magical happenings, and thought-provoking ideas you expect from Spielberg. There is even a touch of religion, in which a nun points out that the Bible literally says God endowed the human race with the greatest minds on Earth, not in the universe. The psychic duel scene between Scanlon and Jane is wonderfully played.
Emily Blunt and Colin Firth were brilliant, but critics were also blown away by a scene in which Courtney Grace plays an ordinary TV reporter reacting to the world-shattering revelations that have been revealed. Personally, I finally now know why everyone in the world has a cell phone: so the aliens can speak to all of us at once and bypass the interference of governments.