Dark Skies

 

It's not so much that Dark Skies is a bad, or even an unwatchable movie.  It actually has very good intentions.  It wants to be a slow burn paranormal thriller, that ratchets up the tension as the story goes on, and largely keeps its mysterious menace in the shadows for the entire running time.  Unfortunately, I don't know if writer-director Scott Stewart (2011's Priest) was the man for this particular job.  His method of storytelling is very confused and repetitive, and he ends up getting a couple unintentional laughs when he's supposed to be scaring us.

On another note, it would have been nice if Stewart could have come up with some of his own ideas for his film.  A lot of his images seem to have been lifted whole from other thrillers, past or recent.  I don't expect every movie I see to be wholly original.  But, when the movie starts turning into a game of "spot which movie the film is currently imitating", it becomes distracting.  Off the top of my head, I note that Stewart has drawn "inspiration" from films such as Poltergeist, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, in particular, seems to be a big influence here), Paranormal Activity, Signs, and even Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.  That's not to say he doesn't have some of his own good ideas thrown in here and there.  I liked his use of overhead shots, which seem to suggest someone or something ominous is watching the action from above.  But on the whole, he fails to bring his own unique vision to his own story, and instead cobbles together a bunch of images and ideas from movies he's seen over the years.

Like a lot of the films he's trying to emulate, the action is set in a seemingly-normal suburb.  Here, we meet the Barrett family.  Dad Daniel (Josh Hamilton) is an unemployed architect, desperately trying to get back in the game after being laid off months ago.  Mom Lacy (Keri Russell) now has a lot of pressure, being the only one working.  Things aren't going so great for her at work, either.  She's a realtor, struggling to unload an outdated old house she's been stuck with selling.  They have two kids - alienated 13-year-old Jesse (Dakota Goyo) and youngest son Sam (Kadan Rockett), who likes to listen to the scary stories his brother tells him over their walkie-talkies late at night.  The trouble for the family begins when it appears that someone is sneaking into their home late at night, and pulling pranks, such as emptying all the food from the fridge, or stealing all the pictures from photo frames in the living room.

The police chalk it up to one of the kids playing a trick.  When Lacy asks little Sam if he knows anything, he keeps on talking about someone called the "Sandman" who visits his room every night and talks to him.  Somehow, despite their established cash problems, Daniel is able to rig up an elaborate home video security system that allows him to monitor every room in the house while they're asleep.  That's when the ominous signs start building up.  The cameras seem to go all wonky at certain times of the night.  Sam starts sleepwalking, with no memory of what happened.  Daniel and Lacy start suffering blackouts, and exhibiting strange behavior that they can't explain.  Their house is the target of three different flocks of birds, who seemingly all go crashing into the house at once.  Strange marks and bruises begin to appear on both of the childrens' bodies, leading the neighbors to suspect that Daniel and Lacy are abusing them.

All of this certainly sounds interesting, but its all paced so poorly, it never generates the tension that it should.  There is also a frustrating lack of answers, at least until the third act, when a walking plot exposition device enters the movie, in the form of an alien expert played by J.K. Simmons.  Seeing him appear, my interest immediately shot up.  Simmons is a wonderful actor who can liven up just about any film he's in, but he's not given a character to play here.  He simply shows up to explain the plot to Daniel and Lacy, and to us, then disappears.  You don't put an actor as valuable as Simmons in your movie, and basically use him as the Narrator.  Once he exits, we get a very confusing climax, and the movie ends with one of those scenes that's supposed to make us realize how clever it was for fooling us, but by that point, we just don't care.

Dark Skies has been competently made, despite its obvious meager budget.  Even the performances are better than this material deserves, especially Keri Russell, who makes a convincing mother trying to protect her family from invisible forces that she doesn't quite understand.  It just never seems to build to anything in particular.  Stewart's script and direction piles on the atmosphere and potentially creepy moments, but most of them have no pay off.  As the odd occurrences build up within the Barrett home, we keep on waiting for the pace to pick up, but it strangely never does.  It's cautious, laid back, and kind of tedious.  We don't become invested with the characters or the strange things happening around them.  And since things never seem to build, we start to expect a disappointing payoff when the film starts to lead up to something, which the movie sadly obliges.

 

I guess the real problem that it all boils down to is that there was no need for Dark Skies to be made.  It's not original, it's not ambitious, and it never seems sure in where it wants to take us.  And yet, I can't bring myself to completely hate it.  There was obviously some effort put behind this.  Too bad the material doesn't deserve a lot of that effort it got.

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