Wednesday Movie Night: Dark Skies (2013)

Dark Skies seems like a good, terrifying premise, until it just gets old. Scott Stewart seems to still be looking for the hit that he didn't find with Priest and Legion yet. Dark Skies has good effects, which he is known for, but the story just panders. You also have to find aliens scary, and as someone who has only been terrified by one Alien I just don't find them scary otherwise. This movie tries to make aliens just as spooky in the same way that demons and ghost are in Paranormal Activity and Insidious.

Summary: The Barret family is trying to get their peaceful suburban life together. The mother and children seem like they are unaware of the father's struggles to maintain a job, and provide for their family. When Lacy and Daniel begin to suspect something is happening to their children though their lives begin to get a lot worse than they would have expected. Not only are the children waking up to wander strangely outside at night, or having convulsions in the middle of the day after blacking out, but the same occurrences are beginning to happen to the parents as well. Now the force causing these things is closing in on their family, as the family struggles to find out what it is they are after.


Acting: Keri Russell is the mother, Lacy, and Russell is good. She isn't a bad actress, but she also doesn't do anything particularly stirring here either. Josh Hamiliton is the father, Daniel. For some reason the father's in these types of movies always come off the most stereotypical. He doesn't want to admit something is happening though something clearly is, but the development in is characters do work as he wants to become a better father. Now the kids in the movies are just very stereotypical. It's like they gave the youngest actor who is Sam a bunch of freaky children to watch in movies, and then just told him to act like that. He had no personality. Then the other, Jesse, may have been a good actor, but he is so whiny that it just feels like any old teen you don't want to be around about to turn 13.

Filming: While this movie is a horror movie, they seemed to really want to make some odd indie vibes going on it. The music does not fit the movie at all. The director does create some eerie moments though that work. Like the security cameras that the family sets up, and will view after they wake up to see if any encounters were filmed in the house. The way the aliens are conveyed on the movie at one of the scariest hours of the night, 2 a.m. was just sort of spooky.

Plot: The plot builds up the suspense nicely, but for me there is never a way to wonder where an alien movie will go. It can only go in one direction, and that is usually they are wanting to abduct or destroy something in order to obtain something. There isn't all the suspense that comes along with ghost movies that we get that are a lot more spooky because someone died. Also, the movie goes in a worst direction that expected. The ending would have worked better if the family had gained something from what they had learned, but instead it just ends without being satisfying to the viewer.

Dark Skies is well done, and even does achieve giving you the creeps. The acting is a little bland though, and the plot goes nowhere, so you feel like you've wasted a bit of time on the movie by the end of it. I think though that the movie doesn't go too insane, and before the lesson that the family learns is destroyed, it does try to make some sort of unifying point.

Rating 6 of 10.