What a joyride through important ideas ‘Disclosure Day’ is

I would advise even Emily Blunt against pulling away from a KC cop making a traffic stop, though.

By Melinda Henneberger

_{Emily Blunt as Kansas City weatherwoman Margaret Fairchild in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day.’ (Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment)}

I’m just going to put out there that if we are not alone in the universe, the case for first contact with a Kansas City empath is strong.

Even Emily Blunt at the peak of her powers, however, I would advise against driving away from a KC cop making a traffic stop.

To anybody who doesn’t know what I’m talking about because you haven’t yet seen ‘Disclosure Day,’ what a pleasure you have ahead of you.

Unlike my husband, I’m not a big sci-fi fan. But it was Father’s Day, and I’m so glad he picked the picture. Otherwise, I might have missed this joyride through important ideas – and since when is that even a thing?

Read no further if you want no spoilers, though at this point, you’d almost have to be an extraterrestrial not to know what happens.

We know from the start that Emily Blunt’s Margaret Fairchild is one extraordinary weatherwoman. Not because she does her apparently trademark shimmy while cooing that hail is her absolute favorite precipitation — hubboy — but because she looks to be living in a loft somewhere out East while working for a Kansas City news station. No wonder she was stopped for speeding on her way to work.

‘The foremost evolutionary advantage’

Spielberg has said this is a chase movie, and that chase starts almost at once, as goodnik whistleblower Dr. Daniel Kellner, played by Josh O’Connor, smuggles some mysterious device out of the building where he works.

But his evil-doing employers, led by the former Mr. Darcy, Colin Firth, whose misdeeds are not enhancing either his health or his allure, will do anything to stop him from spilling that the U.S. government has been covering up its sometimes brutal interactions with aliens for 75 years.

All Daniel is trying to reveal, along with Margaret, who after a visit from you-know-who can suddenly see into the hearts and heads of all those around her, is proof of long-suppressed truth about alien life that our government has been hiding.

Sometimes on Daniel’s side and sometimes not is his girlfriend Jane, played by Eve Hewson, whose own Big Secret is that she used to be a nun.

What I love most about this movie is how Margaret can neutralize any threat from someone who means her harm by appearing to that person as someone they loved, and speaking in that person’s voice not some calming nonsense, but some core truth.

The aliens in ‘Disclosure Day’ know that empathy is "the foremost evolutionary advantage,” and before those who today mock that truth ever get to some other planet, they may have to learn that, too.

What the movie suggests is that you do not have to have an experience of the kind Margaret has had, or be able to offer the kind of specifics she does — your wife didn’t mean it; she just needs a nap, she informs the cop who pulled her over — to have this kind of otherworldly impact in your own daily life.

‘Brad, get out of the chair’

The tension never lets up alongside all this uplift, and there are some laugh-out-loud lines, too, as when, near the end, the female co-anchor at the Kansas City news station orders the refusing-to-budge male anchor outta the chair so Margaret can tell the whole world about the story that will presumably change everything.

Then she asks Margaret, who has just recovered a mind-blowing childhood memory, jumped on a moving train and an invisible fire truck and learned that only she and Daniel can speak to extraterrestrials, whether she’s changed her hair.

As I said, I am not into sci-fi, and I will see this movie again.

Sure, there are a couple of false notes. When Jane the ex-nun tells Daniel that he simply can’t tell the truth that there are other evolved life forms in the universe, because then people wouldn’t believe in God anymore, that makes zero sense to me.

Eventually, Jane’s former novice master Sister Maura, played by Elizabeth Marvel, salvages this silliness by telling her, “Why would He make such a vast universe and save it only for us?"

(I told my husband I was sure we’d seen Marvel play a nun before. Close: She played the POTUS in Homeland.)

If there were one moment in the movie I could cut, it would be the one that some ninny kneels before this Margaret who knows things and makes the sign of the cross.

But to me, the ending is perfect. If we only did what Margaret tells us the alien right in front of her has whispered — it’s just one word, and one thing we’ve stopped doing — then we could not go wrong.

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