DARK SKIES

Dark Skies (15)

Director: Scott Stewart

Screenplay: Scott Stewart

Starring: Keri Russell, Jake Brennan

Once you've been chosen, you belong to them

Remember E.T.? Well, imagine if the little brown dude was NOT a lovable wuss, but he was in fact a slender “Gray”. And instead of hiding in the toy cupboard and cooing over a 7 year old Drew Barrymore, he was a complete bastard with unfathomable technology and just wanted to mess with Elliott’s head and to make him wet himself just for a laugh! There, in a nutshell is the concept for “Dark Skies”.

Released in the UK cinemas on the 3rd April, “Dark Skies” is a science-fiction/horror film about the effect that Alien intervention has on a normal family in suburban USA. If you will, it comes across as a cross between “Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind” and “Poltergeist”.

The film focuses on the Barrett family. There’s Father Daniel (Josh Hamilton), Mother Lacy (Keri Russell), oldest son Jesse (Dakota Goyo), and youngest son Sammy (Kadan Rockett, awesome name by the way Kiddo!). To all intents and purposes they seem to be the archetypical family, living the “American Dream”. The first few scenes of the film set up the banal day-to-day routines of the characters. They have a barbeque, discuss the price of coffee (no, really, they do), and engage in pleasantries with the neighbours, whilst the eldest kid goofs off with his douche-bag buddy and watches pornography. There are cracks starting to show though. Daniel is an out-of-work architect looking for business, and Lacy is having to work twice as hard as an estate agent to get by (She’s an honest one though, so she obviously didn’t read the job description properly!). The bills are piling up and it’s starting to look grim. But that’s when things start to get really bad…

Restless at night, Lacy is startled to find things stolen from the fridge, sculptures of tinned food in the kitchen, and the family photos are stolen. The security alarms are also going off for no reason, and birds are throwing themselves at the house windows like teenage girls at Justin Bieber. They report this all to the Police, who are about as useful as a camel on roller-skates. In fact, they basically roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders, and say “Kids, eh?” blaming the two boys. But Sammy especially seems to know that something isn’t right, and constantly refers to conversations with “The Sandman”.

The incidents escalate, until all the family start to exhibit unnatural physical and mental conditions. It is only then that they contact a “specialist” in these matters (isn’t the Internet just great?), a man with experience of these incidents called Edwin Pollard (the great J.K. Simmons), who advises them on how to react. With this knowledge they prepare for a confrontation…

Now, this film would be a lot better if half of those incidents I’ve described took up less screen time. As it is, it’s over two-thirds into the running time before the parents drop their wall of denial, and accept that they’ve been singled out by strange forces. By which time most of the audience are constantly face-palming and have second-guessed what’s happening to them, even if they haven’t seen the trailer or looked at any publicity stills. It just seems to be all build-up and little pay-off in terms of plot. The other major issue is that it just seems to be all “second-hand” scares, and for a film that promises fresh alien-orientated scares, there’s absolutely nothing that we haven’t seen in other films before. The Kitchen “sculpture” is from “Poltergeist”. The bright lights are from “CE3K”. Even the video monitoring is a direct re-run of scenes from “Paranormal Activity”.

The film also seems to be rather lightweight on the scare factor. People standing in gardens, with their mouths wide open, and with a little bit of a nose-bleed, isn’t necessarily scary … no matter how loud you play the soundtrack! There a couple of effective scenes, where Lacy chances upon something unexpected in her son’s room, but even these seem reminiscent of “Insidious”. To be honest, if you compare any of the climatic scenes in “Dark Skies” with the abduction of the small boy in “CE3K”, there’s no contest in terms of scariness, and that’s a 36 year old film! (Christ! I feel old!). You know you have problems when the aliens in a Crunchy Nut Cornflake advert, shown prior to the main feature, are more unsettling than those in the film!

As regards the leading actors, Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton acquit themselves well enough, but the script doesn’t give them much to work with. The two sons aren’t bad, but Sammy is waaaa-aaay too whiny to evoke much sympathy. Only J.K. Simmons as the defeated abductee makes a real impact, but has little screen time. The director, Scott Stewart (known for the Paul Bettany-fests, “Priest” & “Legion”) is efficient enough with the camera work, but it almost feels like a one of the old made-for-TV movies that were about in the 70’s and 80’s.

Oddly enough, the most successful element of the plot is the sly digs that it has against the US ideals that make up the suburban “dream”. It’s telling that Daniel is more worried about his neighbours finding out that he has money problems, than he is with his youngest son’s mental state. A potent image crops up later, when the family sit around a table crying, in a bordered up house, whilst the American anthem plays over 4th of July celebrations on the TV. You can’t help but think a lot of this is being driven by frustration with the current economic issues as opposed to alien jiggery pokery. As for the aliens themselves, they just seem to be grinding this family into the dirt, just for the sheer hell of it! Intergalactic bullies, if you will…

So there you have it, one or two moments that strike home and the domestic-nightmare element of it works well, but it promises a hell of a lot more than it actually delivers, and it really isn’t anything that we haven’t seen before or better.

More of a dissection of the “American Dream” than an Alien Horror flick. Some effective scare moments, but these are few and far between. It feels like a TV true-life movie and it takes far too long in establishing its concept. You’d be better off hunting down past films like “Fire in the Sky” or even “CE3K” for more potent alien frights.