They can’t all be winners. Steven Spielberg remains one of American cinema’s all-time greatest directors, and his best films – including Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Schindler’s List – are deservedly praised classics. I do not think Disclosure Day, his new science fiction thriller, represents him at his worst, but it does seem very far from his best work. It is a collection of well-shot and paced sequences, and capably staged set pieces, but the underlying narrative is remarkably weak and the nuts-and-bolts structure is poorly conceived. His talent as a filmmaker is still evident, but in this specific case he and screenwriter David Koepp have failed.

Weather presenter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) spontaneously develops psychic powers and an ability to speak in foreign languages. This leads her to suffer an unexplained neurological episode, speaking an alien gibberish on a state-wide television broadcast. At the same time cybersecurity specialist Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) goes on the run from an anonymous government contractor with a video archive revealing decades of human interaction with extra-terrestrial life. Both find themselves the target of rival elements: one (Colin Firth) seeking to keep the evidence secret from the public, and another (Colman Domingo) set on releasing it to the world.

The technical elements of Disclosure Day are superb. A series of key chase and action scenes are shot and edited with the skill and experience one has come to accept from Spielberg and his standard crew of filmmaking talent. Janusz Kamiński’s milky, rich cinematography demonstrates a typically effective depth of field and is well-suited to the contemporary setting. John Williams’ orchestral score is powerfully effective. Sarah Broshar finally takes the reins as Spielberg’s key editor, following a string of pictures assisting former editor Michael Kahn (now retired at 95 years old), and does an excellent job. The cast is also packed with demonstrable talent, including Blunt, O’Connor, Domingo, and Eve Hewson. There are even stand-outs in minor roles, notably Courtney Grace who does an incredible job in a last-minute key role that closes out the film.

It is particularly good to see Colin Firth playing such a distinctive character from his typical oeuvre, all steel and cold menace, and it is a shame he did not get to play this sort of part in a stronger picture. All of this talent is sadly misapplied and redundant, because the basic concepts feel weak, and the structure of the narrative is poor. The film consistently feels as if it should be more gripping and satisfying than it is. What it is is dull.

Genuinely half of its problems are caused by a weak and opaque first act, which spends too much time on tense action without taking the proper time to establish its characters. We meet Daniel Kellner on the run without Spielberg and Koepp establishing who he is or why he is running. We never feel properly introduced to his or anyone else’s motivations. The stakes never feel as global and all-encompassing as one feels its writer and director want them to. At the same time a lack of strong character introductions across the board prevent it from feeling very personal and intimate either. That middle ground looks and plays out like mediocrity.

Beyond structural issues there is a lack of creativity in how Spielberg, in developing the basic story, handles the entire alien contact subject matter. This film represents his third trip to that particular well. The first, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), was a spectacular capture of a growing cultural zeitgeist that combined both the fear and the wonder that such contact would generate. The second, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) managed to both tell a smart science fiction story and define a decade’s worth of American popular entertainment about the youth experience in the 1980s. Disclosure Day, coming decades after the entire subject matter was palpably redefined by Chris Carter’s The X Files, does not have anything new or progressive to say. It apes that show’s paranoia, and it tries to conclude on a more uplifting Close Encounters-esque tone, but there is no element that has not been seen before or done more effectively somewhere else.

Some times even the greatest talents in the world wind up making bad art. Disclosure Day is a deeply ordinary, immediately forgettable film.