Dark Skies: Rated “PG-13” (97 Minutes)
Starring: Keri Russell, Dakota Goyo, Josh Hamilton, Annie Thurman, Trevor St. John
Directed by: Scott Charles Stewart
Truthfully, we’re really torn with this film. While we actually kind of liked it, we did find it to be a tad repetitive in that it seemed to simply recycle a number of old alien abduction tropes going all the way back to the grandfather of all alien-abduction films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In this version of the scenario, An “economically depressed” husband and wife Daniel (Hamilton) and Lacey Barret (Russell) begin to witness an ever-escalating series of disturbing events involving their family. As their situation worsens (Daniel is an out-of-work architect, while Lacey is a Realtor attempting to move less-than-ideal homes in a depressed market), their safe and peaceful home slowly unravels with each succeeding event.
Their oldest son is your typical disassociated young teen, interested in girls, getting high, and videogames (though not necessarily in that order)., Their younger son however, starts to have nightly visits from the “sandman” (based mostly on a scary story his older brother told him), and then the weird stuff begins happening in the house (the alarms go off and no doors or windows opening, three flocks of birds body-slam themselves en mass into the building, and one night Lacy even sees some shadowy figure standing over the younger son’s bed. Then marks appear on the younger son’s body, he starts sleep walking and each of the four family members suffers some sort of unseen paralyzing attacks on themselves.
Eventually Lacy gets curious and begins to look the incident types on the Internet and (lo and behold) she is lead right to the site that all but says “Hey, you’ve been visited by aliens!” Which then leads her to the site that (again all but says). “And this is the local creepy expert in that field, who will help.” (All a bit too pat for me, which is one of the minor objections I have with the film, because we all know that everything you see on the Internet is not only credible, it is totally true). Well, as it turns out she is ready to believe, but Daniel isn’t quite there yet (Seriously, what is it that these people need? Face-Huggers flinging themselves at them? A voice shouting at them from the refrigerator “ZUL!” A little green fellow with a light up finger, eating their Reese’s Pieces, and telling them to phone-home? Wgat?)
Eventually, however when it finally becomes clear to Daniel that their family is being targeted by an unimaginably terrifying and deadly force, Daniel and Lacey attempt to take matters in their own hands to solve the mystery of what is after their family. Ultimately, however the one burning question that is never answered, is why them? Why has their family been targeted by these ubiquitous big-headed gray aliens. No satisfactory answer is ever given, and we are simply left with images that were once terrifying in CE3K when little Toby Neary went walking towards the light.
Still, in spite of these admittedly repetitive visuals, and the whole, why is it so difficult for folks to believe that something really weird is going on even in the face of overwhelming evidence? The film did hold together well enough to keep it interesting all the way through.
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Robert J. Sodaro has been reviewing films for some 30 years. During that time, his movie reviews and articles have appeared in numerous print publications, as well as on the web. Subscribe to receive regular articles and movie reviews.
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