Review of Dark Skies (2013) by Grant H — 07 Oct 2014

Dark Skies starts off like your normal haunting/possession movie. And many of the elements fall right in line with what you expect from such cinema.

You've got shifting things in the house, creepy shadowy figures, suicidal animals, you know, normal possessiony stuff for these kinds of movies. Not to mention the classic "woman sees the problem, husband thinks she's just being hysterical" mark of misogyny.

What sets Dark Skies apart is making the bad guy aliens instead of demons or dead people. There are no exorcisms, no chanting psychics, no soul robbing. The shift from demon/ghost to ET has an interesting cascading effect on how the movie plays out.

As I said above, there are no psychics or exorcisms. No priests in robes. No firmly clenched Bibles or crucifixes. How do you deal with aliens? And that is a part of what makes Dark Skies compelling--it breaks the normal path simply by being aliens.

However, that doesn't make Dark Skies a perfect movie. It tries to pull in a lot of outside little plot lines to pad out the runtime. Some of them tie back into the main plot rather tidily. But most are just excess fluff, like the light romance between the oldest son and one of his friends. Or how he and his friends break into an unoccupied home. Or all the financial/job troubles.

Even at an hour and thirty-seven minutes, Dark Skies felt over-long. I'd love to say that it was exactly seven minutes worth of excess, and maybe it was. But I suspect it was more than that.