Steven Spielberg begins his new film, Disclosure Day, in the middle of things. A matter of grave geopolitical importance is unfolding in the background—aggressions from North Korea sparking talk of WWIII—but the central plot of the film is well underway, too. The audience is dropped right in, forced to hit the ground running alongside the film.

On first viewing, that caused me some consternation. Just as the film’s protagonists—Josh O’Connor’s hacker renegade, Daniel, and Emily Blunt’s flighty weather girl, Margaret—are whisked away on a journey they don’t initially understand, I too had trouble keeping up. That frustration turned me a little prickly toward the movie; most of what I could focus on were small plot holes or creaky Spielbergian indulgences. I left the movie a bit flabbergasted, not sure what to make of this steadfastly earnest, entreating film. 

I had wanted to love it. Or, really, I was insistent on giving myself a chance to love it, so I went to see the film a second time a few days later, a decision that, I’m happy to say, paid off handsomely. A repeat viewing essentially puts you in a place of omniscience, on the side of the aliens, or at least that of Colman Domingo’s wise, three-steps-ahead alien-human liaison, Hugo. Having a clear idea of where the movie was headed gave me more time to savor just what Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp are attempting, what their film is trying to argue—or, maybe, just suggest—to an audience of modern-day skeptics, jaded and weary from knowing everything and not nearly enough at once. 

A slightly uncharitable read of the movie is that this is Spielberg, the great 79-year-old dream-weaver, pining to return to the monoculture he once seemed to dominate. Disclosure Day is a movie about unifying awe, something singular and spectacular that might bind together a fractured world. Could Spielberg be referencing his own movies? The film essentially gives an E.T. adventure to two grownups, who gradually remember something extraordinary—in all its fright and wonderment—that they experienced as children. “Remember what it used to feel like?,” Spielberg might be saying. “When such magnificent visions helped shape your idea of the world?”

After all, the sprawl of the internet, its terrible diffusing and atomizing effect, has left people alone in their recursive echo chambers. Faith has warped or faltered, the keys to order have been handed over to tech companies who want to control and surveil, even the once-mighty U.S. government—whose true birth Spielberg documented in Lincoln—has been shut out in favor of profit. Maybe Disclosure Day self-consciously posits that cinema could play a part in reversing that entropy.