Eyes deceive in Steven Spielberg’s latest blockbuster. Disclosure Day, the storied director’s fifth film in which humans encounter aliens, hinges on characters adjusting their literal and metaphysical views as they experience the unknown. The truth is out there, and if the heroes can outrun a shadowy corporation, traumatic pasts, and mysterious phenomena, they can catch up to it. In this way, the film is classic Spielberg: a widescreen spectacle grounded in both the wondrous sensation of feeling one’s world expand and the challenge of acting on that epiphany.

Less rewarding this time around, however, is the journey to that big discovery and the larger ideas behind what is revealed. Although it kind of works as a smooth-brained blockbuster, Disclosure Day too often feels familiar, echoing Spielberg’s past work while nostalgically clinging to 20th-century imagery and ideals. Despite being based on an original story conceived by Spielberg and fleshed out by his long-time collaborator David Koepp (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds), the film is frustratingly backward-looking. We’ve seen this UFO story before—in Spielberg’s oeuvre, in shows like The X-Files, and in so many other places.

The disclosure at the center of the film is set in motion by Daniel Kellner (played by Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity whistleblower who steals a trove of data from his employer, a mysterious company called Wardex, and races to deliver it to the public. The data proves the existence of aliens and the US defense industry’s decades-long cover-up of the info, and Daniel, a loner with hangdog eyes, is wracked with guilt as he shepherds it along. He knows he can divulge this grand secret only because he used to protect it.

As Wardex sends its armed goons after Daniel and his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), a television meteorologist named Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) also experiences a radical shift in perspective. After a close encounter with a bird that flies into her Kansas City apartment, she finds herself developing psychic powers and speaking languages she never learned, including a freaky glottal croak that she involuntarily utters during a live broadcast. When Wardex comes for her as well, Margaret hits the road in search of Daniel, whom she’s never met but feels drawn to. As the thoughts and desires of strangers flood into Margaret’s consciousness, she also becomes a vessel for others’ secrets and finds the strength to confront her own.

While the chase drives the plot, the story is rooted in the spiritual conflict of learning that aliens exist, which unmoors the characters. In this regard, Blunt is the highlight, deftly rolling with the film’s tonal swings from action to comedy to melodrama. Her bemused expressions, sly line readings, and jittery gestures convey the whimsy and hope of the story as much as its paranoia. Her Margaret is a kind of on-the-go guru, stumbling into her purpose in real time while helping others, including Daniel, find their own. This flexibility is rare for an alien-contact story, a subgenre that tends to rely heavily on the contrast between skeptics and believers.

The other performances in Disclosure Day aren’t as gripping. Hugo (Colman Domingo), a Wardex defector who leads the rebel group orchestrating the big disclosure, is seriously underwritten. Similar to Morpheus in The Matrix, Hugo helps the fugitives outmaneuver the company’s black-suited shock troops, urging the pair to push forward and believe with the calm of a priest. He isn’t quite as mesmerizing or enticing as Morpheus, though. At one point, Daniel threatens to release the cache to the Internet rather than jump through hoops to rendezvous with Hugo, and the latter doesn’t offer a compelling reason not to do so beyond that’s not the plan. As the mastermind of the movie’s central conflict, Hugo—whom Domingo plays as a kind of professorial life coach—should have much more conviction and aura. Even a cool suit would have gone a long way.

The villains are just as humdrum. Led by the ruthless Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), Wardex uses its otherworldly resources in ways that loosen the tension of the chase. Through reverse-engineered alien tech, they have the ability to remotely communicate with and possess the bodies of people, Professor X–style, but no one at the company ever seems to have their thinking cap on.

Besides a thrilling sequence that involves Margaret and Daniel leaping from a car to an oncoming train, the pair evades and circumvents the company without much cleverness or difficulty. (One egregious scene, which involves Noah infiltrating Hugo’s mind, effectively unravels the movie.) But even if that moment never happened, the incompetent hunters would still feel closer in spirit to the bumbling pursuers of E.T. than to the ominous spooks and G-men of The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, clear reference points for Disclosure Day.

The middling thrills wouldn’t feel as limp if the story had more thematic heft, but Spielberg doesn’t have much novel to say about aliens, deep-state conspiracies, or whistleblowing. His aliens flatly represent the unknown, offering no distinct culture or competing belief system beyond “empathy,” which they emptily want to share with humanity. They are more an abstraction than a presence—even down to their bland designs, which draw on the lanky, wide-eyed humanoids of mid-century pulp. The same goes for Wardex, with its one-dimensional protectionism of state secrets. The film offers no motive for the company’s participation in the government cover-up beyond wealth and power; nor do the heroes seem particularly hung up on the ethics of its grisly experiments with alien bodies and devices. The malfeasance is generic.

The whistleblowing is the film’s emptiest motif. The disclosure plays out in a deflating climax that brings all the key parties to the local television station where Margaret works. Spielberg anachronistically presents the studio as the last bastion of truth, cutting between the rebels’ attempts to upload the stolen data and Wardex’s efforts to kill the building’s power.

The symbolism is too hokey and nostalgic to feel triumphant. The public depicted as the audience for this broadcast, which becomes global as the station shares its feed with others, is inert and unquestioning. Spielberg shows people worldwide receiving this earth-shattering news—and yet no one reacts. There’s no spin from the people in power, no doubt from trolls, no denial from skeptics, no celebration from believers. Truth simply prevails.

That sentiment might have been galvanizing if Disclosure Day had meaningfully explored the public and its relationships both to state lies and mystical phenomena, but here it comes off as an unearned win. Margaret’s and Daniel’s ties to the aliens, revealed in a dreamy sequence that revisits their childhoods, is maudlin even by Spielberg’s standards. The moment is intended to ground their pursuit of truth, to show how one encounter with the unexplained profoundly changed their lives. But this reveal isn’t actualizing; it grants them no real stakes in the world before or after the disclosure. They, like the audience, are simply along for the ride.