Crop Circle Realities (2021)

Shudder’s Host (not a particularly original title, I must say) attempts to bring the spooks to “the quarantine generation” by presenting us with a scary Zoom call during lockdown.

We're making today a perfect day for you, and for everyone.

This incarnation of Animal Farm is filled with the generic plot points, immature humor, cardboard characters and visual flaws that you have come to know from today’s lesser children’s films.

These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.

James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) marks the beginning of a wonderful two-part arc, brimming with style and substance. The film follows Sarah Connor, a waitress living in Los Angeles. One night, a cybernetic organism (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back in time to kill Sarah. A human resistance fighter (Michael Biehn) is also sent back in time, with the intent of saving Sarah from this deadly foe.

Disclosure Day asks us to question humanity's role in the universe but falls victim to the same assumptions of centrality.