This is 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind writ very large.
Director Steven Spielberg’s original story — fleshed out by skilled genre screenwriter David Koepp — hits the ground running, and trusts viewers to catch up.
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| Despite being surrounded by shadowy agents with orders to apprehend them, each one unexpectedly steps aside as Margaret (Emily Blunt) and Daniel (Josh O'Connor) slowly walk toward potential freedom. |
This is made clear by the fact that Casper Boyd (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), Scanlon’s go-to “dirty work” field agent, kidnapped Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), in order to facilitate this exchange. It looks fairly cut and dried ... until Daniel raises a small, slender, metallic bipyramid that he holds in one carefully gloved hand.
Scanlon and all of his black-garbed associates carefully back away.
Daniel and Jane flee, which kicks off the first of this film’s several pell-mell chase sequences. They manage to escape, much to Scanlon’s vexation. (Firth displays an impressive level of barely controlled rage.) But how can they stayhidden, given all the high-tech surveillance resources available to Scanlon?
Meanwhile...
Chirpy Kansas City KCXE-TV news meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), after completing a day’s work, returns home to boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell), a low-stress musician and Fruit Loops-loving Everyman. The following morning, before she leaves for the morning shift, they’re startled when a red cardinal flies in an open window and perches on the kitchen table.
And stares at her. She stares back, trance-like, Blunt’s expression suddenly a blank, wordless slate.
Shaking herself from this fugue, she rushes off to work. After arriving at KCXE, she suddenly starts speaking in foreign languages ... including, as this scene’s uneasy atmosphere builds, a series of guttural clicks, burps and grunts that don’t sound the slightest bit human.
Shortly thereafter, she feels a strange, strong pull to go “somewhere else,” much to Jackson’s bewilderment. Somewhere north.
Throughout scenes with these two sets of characters, disturbing radio reports and TV news broadcasts warn of the rapidly increasing probability of a world-wide nuclear war. The threat level jumps to DEFCON 2.
