I made a pact with myself (a post from 22 years ago) in a dark living room a long time ago, right around the time the bicycle in E.T. left the ground. Any film Spielberg makes, I watch it first day. With Jurassic Park I renewed the pact and Schindler’s List made it permanent. I have kept it faithfully over the years. So yesterday I sat in an IMAX and watched Spielberg make another alien movie, and I am happy to report it is nothing like E.T. Thank God. The man refuses to make the same movie twice, and I refused to want the same movie twice. E.T. held every warm thing a human heart can hold. Disclosure Day is cold. It should be. A film about institutions burying the truth for eighty years has no business being warm. The director who made us cry at a glowing finger has made a film where the chill is the point.

Spielberg still believes in story, the actual old-fashioned kind. Two stories run in parallel here, braided, and the braiding is timed so well that the film never loses momentum. It is also never breakneck, which these days feels illegal. Movies all over the world now are terrified that you might get bored. Spielberg has never seemed worried about that. He builds, he blocks and stages his actors like a pro, because he has been doing this for sixty years. The signature pan is here, the one that starts at an obscure angle and shows you the whole room before you see the trouble in the room. John Williams is 94 and still scoring. Their 30th film together. It is the most restrained score of his career until suddenly it is not. You get invested in these characters the old way, slowly and honestly. Josh O’Connor carries the movie on his back, sometimes literally, in a backpack full of the truth. Emily Blunt and Colin Firth show up and supply much-needed gravity. Brilliant casting all around.

Toward the end, Spielberg attempts the water cooler moment. The whole world watching the same screen at the same time. If you grew up in the eighties and nineties you remember how that felt. There were three channels and one piece of news, and all of us gasped at the same time. The internet broke that into a billion feeds, and here comes Spielberg like an old man herding the whole suburban neighborhood back onto one porch. He does it through a few news control rooms and one broadcast. A little artificial, and I bought it completely. He skips the usual move too, the cut from America to a hut in Africa to a street in India to prove the world exists, and lets the machinery of the news do the work instead. And the news station sits in Kansas City, where Emily Blunt works as a weather anchor, probably in one of her career-best performances. That is no accident either. The geographic center of the lower 48 states is in Kansas. Any other movie would have beamed this announcement from New York or LA. Spielberg announces the aliens from the middle of the country. Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz was from Kansas too. Nobody else would even attempt any of this today. He attempted it and IMHO won.

Do I believe the conspiracy? The movie’s version, yes. Spielberg’s interviews are another matter. He goes on television and says, straight-faced, that they have been here and they are here. I believe his fiction more than his press tour, which is a strange place to be as a fan. The jury is out on the talk shows.

I walked out of the IMAX and the daylight was still there. A summer-ish evening, the sun still hanging around. That is the trick he invented in 1975 with a rubber shark. You sit in the dark for two hours and the summer is still there when you come out. The summer movie was his idea. He can take it back whenever he wants.

The Spielberg summer is back.