In Steven Spielberg movies, it’s not the aliens you should fear. They don’t incubate inside human bodies, à la Alien, or annihilate politicians with fiery ray guns, as in Mars Attacks!. In childhood-defining masterpieces like 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind or 1982’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, they come in peace and inspire more wonder than menace. If we fear anyone, it’s the human officials who seek to capture, control, or suppress them.

At 79, the age at which his hero John Ford died, Spielberg still retains that childlike wonder — and distrust of authority figures who seek to snuff it out. As he approaches the sunset of his career, Spielberg is coming full circle. With his last film, 2022’s sneakily complex The Fabelmans, the beloved filmmaker flipped the camera on his own childhood traumas. Working in a more broadly crowd-pleasing mode, and inspired by a New York Times article about the Pentagon’s secret U.F.O. program, he now revisits a different facet of his past: his lifelong fascination with aliens, the theme that powered much of his early moviemaking, all the way back to his unseen 1964 debut Firelight.

Spielberg clearly still believes we’re not alone, and he channels that belief into Disclosure Day, his first true summer blockbuster in ages. Part conspiracy thriller, part boyishly earnest sci-fi meditation, and part action-bombast dopamine rush, Disclosure Day crackles with an intoxicating “they don’t make ’em like this anymore” energy. With an original story by Spielberg himself (he hired longtime collaborator David Koepp to pen the screenplay), it’s a movie about the human yearning to understand our place in the universe and the mechanisms that keep us in the dark. And if the screenplay gets ham-fisted in negotiating those Big Themes, Disclosure Day is so masterfully crafted and hits so many Spielbergian pleasure centers that you hardly notice.

Newly minted A-lister Josh O’Connor stars as Daniel Kellner, a computer whiz-turned-whistleblower with a dash of Edward Snowden. He’s freakishly smart, handsome in a nerdy way, and has troves of top-secret material and a willingness to risk everything to make world-altering disclosures public. Like Snowden, he also has a loyal girlfriend, a lapsed nun named Jane (Eve Hewson), who gets involuntarily sucked into Daniel’s showdown with a secret agency called Wardex. You see, Daniel has stolen files from Wardex that contain proof of government experiments on aliens, and now some powerful humans — including Wardex’s sinister, mind-reading CEO, Noah (Colin Firth) — are out to get him before he makes it all public.

This is no meditative, Close Encounters-style U.F.O. drama. The movie opens in media res, with a botched hand-off at a wrestling match and subsequent face-off between Daniel and Wardex goons, and mostly sustains that frenetic pace. To some extent, the plot functions as an excuse for a two-hour cat-and-mouse chase that darts through sleepy Midwestern settings and sets up multiple exhilarating action set pieces. Would it surprise you if I told you Steven Spielberg is good at directing action sequences? In one (evoking his childhood influence The Greatest Show on Earth), O’Connor and Emily Blunt leap from a moving car onto a speeding train while dodging bullets. Spielberg shoots it with the kind of sweatily gripping detail that makes you think he misses directing those Indiana Jones movies.

O’Connor is good, as he demonstrated in Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, at playing internal, soft-spoken men on the run. He’s not a bombastic action hero, like Harrison Ford, but locates a brooding intensity that suits the material. His performance projects a confidence not around the perilous physical bravado but instead around the moral rightness of his actions. Firth is compelling, too, the kind of villain who spends a lot of time barking orders at underlings monitoring powerful-looking radar screens.

But the best performance in Disclosure Day belongs to Emily Blunt, who, in an increasingly significant sideplot, plays Margaret, a TV weathergirl who develops bizarre supernatural abilities. Suddenly, she can read people’s minds and speak myriad languages. Blunt is captivating at projecting this woozy mix of confoundment and certainty, a character caught in the throes of forces she does not understand. “Something happened to me a few days ago,” she explains, “and now I know things.” Her telepathic visions bring her to Daniel, and eventually to a grand revelation, facilitated by a sage-like Wardex defector named Hugo (Colman Domingo), of a past encounter with aliens.

At times, Disclosure Day dips into silliness. The script indulges overwrought dialogue about God and fate and What It All Means, and the story throws so many wacky supernatural elements at us — telepathy devices, invisibility sequences — that it undermines its own credibility as a conspiracy thriller. And what strains credulity more than the aliens themselves is the naïve idea that the whole country would unite in belief, should evidence of their existence appear on TV news. But the movie has such a spectacular sense of forward motion — such riveting and sharp action sequences; such arresting cinematography from Janusz Kamiński, who can fill even a drab motel room with mystery and intrigue — that I found myself forgiving these qualms, swept up in the spirit of it all.

If The Fabelmans was a screen memoir, Disclosure Day is more like a greatest hits album. There are palpable traces of so many Spielberg films mingling together here: the thematic obsessions of Close Encounters, the death-defying chase stunts of Indiana Jones (surely it’s no coincidence that Daniel stays at “Inn-Di-Anna Motel”), the frenetic energy of Minority Report, the earnest transparency ideals expressed in The Post.

It is, I suppose, a first-rate piece of fan service. There are fans who want Spielberg to revisit the head-tingling sci-fi themes of Close Encounters. He does so here. There are fans who want him to confront weighty, philosophical questions about humanity, God, religion, and the universe. He does so here — a bit clunkily at times, but still. There are fans who want him to make a high-octane summer blockbuster with vroom-vroom chase sequences and dazzling set pieces. He does that, too. There are fans who want him to make a Hook prequel centered around Rufio’s backstory. Okay, fine, he definitely does not do that here. Why would you want that?

Even in these depraved times, Spielberg retains a certain unshakable optimism about humanity, a quality that separates him from a newer crop of horror/sci-fi auteurs, such as Alex Garland and Jordan Peele. Also, lots of optimism about the power of cable news to still break big stories and unify Americans, but that may just be a Boomer thing.

In Disclosure Day, that optimism exists not in the belief that aliens are real, or that they may someday speak to us. It’s in the faith that humans will listen.

Disclosure Day (★★★★☆) is rated PG-13 and is now playing in theaters nationwide. Visit fandango.com.