365 Days. 365 Films.

When a group of kids are shooting their movie at a railway station they witness a train crashing spectacularly into a van driven by their biology teacher. It appears that their teacher was attempting to stop the train and, more importantly, the cargo. The train ends up spilling mysterious white cubes everywhere, and one of the children, Joe, takes one home as they flee the scene after being told by their teacher, clinging to life, that if they mentioned anything to anyone, they and their families would all be killed. The morning after the crash, strange things start to happen in their town, Lillian. People and dogs disappear and police and stores have mysteriously been torn apart.

As a sci-fi, alien movie, I don’t think your real perception of a movie is really established before you get a glimpse of the alien or aliens. In general this is a brilliant movie – the direction is spot on and the kids are amazing actors, but after catching that all important glimpse of the alien, I didn’t know what to make of it any more. It wasn’t terrible and, as you can imagine, being produced by Spielberg, the CGI was as good as you could hope for, but in terms of the actual design of the alien, it was a little more like a monster than a traditional alien – which is quite important to me as an avid sci-fi fan and UFO obsessive.

The film started off strong and was perfect up until a certain point that I can’t even pinpoint, but somewhere along the line it just lost it a little. During the film you will love it through and through, but by the end of it, you don’t know why, but it’s just not as good as it started off to be. It might be the ‘more monster than alien’ alien, it might be the sudden ending where they allotted the last ten minutes to resolve a full 100 minutes worth of built up exposition, but somewhere it dropped from a five star film to a four star film – still a great movie, but just missing out on being perfect.