A sage person once told me every noted director’s career is an ongoing conversation with the audience. Some film-makers – Michael Haneke, say – sit on high, like a headteacher at an assembly, and loftily number the ways in which we’ve let ourselves and the school down. There are others – Lars von Trier and Ari Aster spring to mind – whose work sidles up uncomfortably close, gooses the viewer and then flees the scene sniggering before the relevant authorities can be alerted. The career of Steven Spielberg – arguably the most remarkable career in the history of popular cinema – has long depended on the audience being on the exact same page, looking up wide-eyed and guileless towards the light: his greatest films, from Close Encounters to The Fabelmans, invite further discussion, an awestruck back-and-forth.Emily Blunt, left, and Josh O'Connor in Disclosure Day. Photograph: Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment/APYou can therefore understand why Spielberg has broached the subject of social division with Disclosure Day, his much-trumpeted return to the summer event movie: he has almost as much skin in this game as the rest of us non-trillionaires. Yet if early box office has been solid enough, secondary indices – not least a slew of disappointed foyer texts from friends and loved ones – would suggest the film has itself proved distinctly polarising. In the US, market research firm CinemaScore – which polls opening-day cinemagoers to assess a film’s commercial prospects – graded Disclosure Day a B, the joint second-worst for a Spielberg film, ahead of AI: Artificial Intelligence (recipient of a harsh C), dead level with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Headmaster Haneke again shakes his weary head.Despite the proximity of aliens, the new film’s focus is primarily human: the secrets we keep, the lies we tell. Disclosure Day thereby dovetails neatly with the themes of several mature-period Spielberg works, notably 2015’s Bridge of Spies and 2017’s The Post. To locate the source of this interest, you need only revisit The Fabelmans – Spielberg’s probing and perceptive movie-memoir of 2022 – which dramatised the effects similar deceptions had on his own household growing up. Screenwriter David Koepp has form in this area, too: his script for last year’s spry and gripping Steven Soderbergh thriller Black Bag unpicked the alibis of bedhopping spies. Yet Disclosure Day’s weak spot is its tissue-thin and arbitrary-seeming plot, its own diaphanous cover story for some altogether antiquated and simplistic editorial.Josh O'Connor, right, and Emily Blunt in Disclosure Day. Photograph: /Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment/APThe setup, granted, is strong: Close Encounters, updated for the information age. First contact here is no longer as harmonious as a five-note call-and-response; as demonstrated by Emily Blunt’s weathergirl, left speaking in tongues, it’s more a matter of mainlining everything on social media (news, multiple languages, a whole century’s crashlandings and cover-ups) in one fell swoop. Phones are bad and must be tossed and driven over. On the trusted list: ordinary people, organised religion, local news (framed as the right, digestible amount of information) and – this being Spielberg – the family home. This ageing viewer has some sympathy for all that, but as a directorial vision, Disclosure Day feels far more old world than new, more 20th century than 21st. How many X-Files reboots does one civilisation need?