If you haven’t noticed, things aren’t all that great out there. I mean, just in general, with wars raging in the Middle East, divisiveness roiling at home, AI poised to take all our jobs—you get the gist. So it makes sense that Steven Spielberg, the great American auteur of optimism, awe, and childlike wonder, would once again look to the skies. He generally sees aliens not as a destructive or frightening force, but benevolent creatures filled with curiosity, kindness, and wisdom. (His take on H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds being a notable exception.)

Disclosure Day is a film that suggests we should all be kinder to each other and listen to each other and lead with our “greatest evolutionary advantage”: empathy. And honestly, who could argue with that? The problem is, I found the final third of the film, when it rather explicitly spells out its themes, a bit moist. The more sentimental it got and the more John Williams’ soaring score all but begged for our tears, the less I enjoyed it.

But man, before that it’s a heckuva ride.

The film starts in medias res, with one of our heroes, Daniel (Josh O’Connor), rescuing his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), from a secretive government agency. (This all takes place at a pro wrestling match because if there’s one thing Spielberg can do it’s shoot the hell out of a set piece.) Daniel has something they need—a remote control-like doohickey that gives you access to other people’s brains and a whole lot more. And because Josh O’Connor has that expressive, gently handsome, sad-clown face, we never doubt for a second that he is the good guy and the men in black cars—led by a spectacularly bearded Colin Firth—are the baddies. Daniel grabs Jane, threatens them all with the doohickey, and escapes to a nunnery. Literally. Turns out Jane was studying to become a nun before she had a crisis of, well, it’s not totally clear. She still clutches her large cross necklace when she’s afraid, at one point, digging it into her palm and creating a kind of Spielbergian stigmata.

Meanwhile, in Kansas City, a perky TV weatherwoman named Margaret (Emily Blunt) sees a cardinal (the bird, not the religious figure) and suddenly just knows things. She speaks to her befuddled boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell, perfectly cast as the kind but clueless dudebro) in Russian. On the way to the television station, she is stopped by a cop for speeding and she knows things about him, too, intuitively. She gives him advice on how to fix things with his wife. (Buy her that red velvet cupcake she likes, she says.) He’s so shocked, he lets her drive away without a ticket. At the station, she speaks perfect Korean to a visiting dignitary—I should mention that while all this is happening, World War III is looming ominously in the background—and then, once on air, starts speaking in clicks and gulps, until she collapses.

Jackson takes her to the hospital but, of course, she doesn’t have a brain tumor or Parkinson’s and she’s pretty sure the men in black lurking outside her hospital room are not there to help.

She escapes and somehow, through a kind of telepathy/shared grokking of the universe, she meets up with Daniel.

There’s another key figure in this film and that’s Colin Firth’s good guy counterpart, Hugo, swathed in professorial tweed and played with paternal warmth by Colman Domingo.

Hugo, if you will, is Team Disclosure—he believes humans would benefit from knowing about the aliens in their midst.

Firth’s Scanlon is Team Concealment—he thinks mankind can’t handle the truth. Let the grownups in the room handle the aliens.

One of the film’s actually interesting philosophical musing has to do with Jane’s faith. If aliens exist, what becomes of God? Is a divine entity no longer necessary? An intriguing premise worked out a bit too patly by Jane’s beloved Mother Superior (Elizabeth Marvel) who notes that God wouldn’t be so selfish as to let all that vast space go to waste.

As mentioned, the first two-thirds of the film absolutely rips. Nobody can do genre better than Spielberg—hell, he invented a bunch of them. Part of that means inserting welcome bits of humor in the midst of the chaos. At one point, Hugo instructs Margaret to ditch her cell phone. She throws it out of the car and tells Jackson to back up over it, but he keeps screwing up—backing up again and again, missing the phone entirely. It’s not quite DiCaprio’s Bob desperate to plug in his phone in One Battle After Another, but it’s the sort of touch that elevates the film.

Because there are few directors who can orchestrate an action scene better than Spielberg, the chase scenes are unsurprisingly electrifying—including one involving a half-crushed car dangling from the side of a train and another one involving a car stopping on a dime at the edge of a cliff.

The acting across the board is exemplary, with Blunt a standout as a woman who suddenly knows everything—and isn’t sure she wants to.

In general, Disclosure Day is rollicking entertainment until that dewy-eyed bit in the end. I understand that Spielberg wants to appeal to our better angels but I wish he had done it in a more subtle way. But for better or for worse—mostly for better— Spielberg’s gotta Spielberg.

(Before signing off, there is one depressing thought I have to get off my chest: Spielberg treats the “disclosure” as a seismic event—a game changer, the kind of thing that would make everyone pause, listen, and rethink their relationship to the planet. But did you know that Donald Trump recently declassified the government’s database about UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) and it was met with a collective shrug? In fairness, there were no cool aliens in the file, but I can’t help but wonder if Spielberg’s premise is outmoded. If CNN broke into programming to tell us there were aliens in our midst, would we even bother to look up from our screens? Would it change a thing?)

There are some films that emphasize the moral murkiness, the absurdity, and the ultimate pointlessness of war. Sam Mendes’s World War I drama, 1917, isn’t that kind of film. It’s more of an earnest “they really were the best of lads, weren’t they?” type deal (the lads in this case are British, not American) and it is concerned largely with myth building and moral absolutes. In that sense, although the film employs a contemporary trick—it creates the uncanny illusion that it was all shot in one continuous take, which evokes a “you are here” sensation—it can accurately be described as old-fashioned. Still, it makes an undeniable case for itself. Corny, for sure. But also exciting, poetic, epic, and stirring. And it has just enough cynicism around the edges to make the whole thing palatable to this war skeptic.

As the film starts, two young soldiers, Will Schofield (George MacKay) and Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), are dozing off and dreaming about the end of the war, which they hope is imminent. They are awakened rather rudely by another soldier, who tells Blake he’s been summoned by the General. He instructs Blake to “pick a man” and follow him. Naturally, he picks Schofield.

In the captain’s barracks, General Erinmore (Colin Firth) gravely tells them their assignment. The 2^nd Battalion is about to attack the Germans, whom they believe to have retreated. In fact, the Germans are lying in wait—it’s a trap. As all communications have been knocked out, the only way to get this news to the Battalion is on foot. As for why he chose Blake? His lieutenant brother is a member of the 2^nd Battalion. If they get there in time, they’ll be saving not just 1,600 soldiers, but his brother’s life.

Blake, hearing this news, is eager to get going, but Schofield hesitates. Shouldn’t they wait until nightfall? Wouldn’t that be more prudent? But Blake has a full head of steam. Time is of the essence and his urgency to get to his brother overpowers his fear. Reluctantly, Schofield concedes. The camera follows them as they make their way through the narrow trenches to get the front lines, shoving people, who bark at them that they’re going the wrong way. More than any other film I’ve seen, 1917 emphasizes how narrow, crowded, and uncomfortable trenches were, with people often sleeping standing up or waiting, fearfully, for their marching orders.

Eventually, they reach the barracks of Lieutenant Leslie (Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott), who’s supposed to send them off. Leslie is a world-weary, jaded man—one of the film’s token cynics—who thinks the boys have been sent on a suicide mission. He assures them that, although they’ll almost certainly die, they’ll get a medal for their efforts. “Nothing like a scrap of ribbon to cheer up a widow,” he says, with grim gallows humor. He gives them flares to shoot in the unlikely event they make it through “No Man’s Land” (advising them to throw the flares back if they’ve been shot—they’re expensive) and bids them good bye.

No Man’s Land is a muddy field filled with blind pits, barbed wire, rotting corpses of soldiers and horses alike—essentially hell on earth. But they make it through (not before Schofield punctures his hand on some of that barbed wire). This, of course, is only the first of many dangerous fields they’ll have to traverse.

Mendes films the first half of the film like a kind of immersive and highly sensory adventure and buddy film. We’re right there with Schofield and Blake, feeling their fear, their adrenaline, their dogged determination to fulfill their mission. Schofield allows himself one moment of self pity: “Why in God’s name did you have to choose me?” he moans at one point. But for the most part, he’s a brave and loyal friend and soldier. Blake is the more garrulous of the two, always telling stories (about a man whose ear was bitten off by a rat; about his mother’s cherry orchards back home), trying to keep their spirits up. Mendes emphasizes their rosy-cheeked youth—neither appears to even shave yet—and their essential decency.

The action is swift and heart-pounding. One minute they’re in a trip-wired German barracks, one minute they’re dodging a downed fighter plane. One character tumbles into a dangerous waterfall. At every corner, a German sniper might be waiting to kill them.

So yeah, about that moral absolutism. There is one token moment where our heroes see a photo of a German soldier’s children pinned to a bedpost—you see? they have families and loved ones, too!—but for the most part, Germans are evil bastards without a modicum of decency who shoot first and ask questions later.

Both young leads are wonderful but relatively unknown (although I’ve been a fan of MacKay’s since Captain Fantastic) so Mendes packs the film with high-profile cameos. On top of the aforementioned Firth and Scott, we have appearances by Mark Strong, Richard Madden, and Benedict Cumberbatch, all excellent. It’s Strong who acknowledges one dark aspect of war. “Some men just want to fight,” his Captain Smith tells Schofield. His words prove to be prophetic.

1917 is dedicated to Sam Mendes’s grandfather, who fought in the war and “who told us stories,” which probably explains the corniness. There are moments when the film slows down to appreciate something graceful or elegiac—sporadic bursts of fire illuminating the ruins of a blown out church, a woman sheltering an abandoned infant, a group of soldiers listening to a man singing a plaintive English folk song in the woods. It would all be unbearably corny if it weren’t so damn beautiful.

War is hell, Mendes argues, but it sure brought out the best in our lads.