“Dark Skies” (2013) – no relation to the 1990s TV series of the same name – is a strong movie considering how filled it is with things we’ve seen before. In the most notable credit from writer-director Scott Stewart, Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton play parents in a Rockwellian suburb whose family begins to be visited by aliens.
Family frights
It’s filled with standards like a little kid drawing a creepy picture, birds crashing into windows, and expert officials who are no help at all. But it stands a cut above typical subgenre fare thanks to the believability of the family and neighborhood, mostly smart actions by the parents, a slow but steady build, and an excellent payoff that’s not overblown but instead focuses on emotional stakes.
“Felicity” veteran Russell enters the mom-roles stage of her career and nicely pairs with Hamilton, who would again master the dad role in “Eighth Grade” (2018). Daniel and Lacy Barrett, modernizations of 1980s Spielbergian parents, have two sons: 13-year-old Jesse (Dakota Goyo) and younger Sam (Kadan Rockett).
A coming-of-age story plays in the margins of “Dark Skies”: Jesse is a good big brother to Sam, telling him scary stories over their room-to-room walkie talkie at night, then soothing his fears when weird stuff starts happening and their folks start arguing. He ventures into the new hobby of girls – namely cute redhead Shelly (Annie Thurman) – but doesn’t lose sight of his family’s problems.
Rationalizations, explanations
It’s kind of hilarious how the police, the security company and animal control have rationalizations for the insanity happening in and around the Barrett house, and it perhaps says something about agencies not communicating with each other.
Also, unless agents from a certain FBI basement visit you, agencies don’t tend to sympathize with theories of aliens. “Dark Skies” misses a beat when Daniel briefly rejects Lacy’s internet-researched alien theory, but the evidence is such that he can’t Scully her for too long.
J.K. Simmons spices up the story as Edwin Pollard. Working out of book-and-cat-filled apartment, Pollard fills the bill of the alien expert but dodges a lot of the clichés. An abductee himself, he’s not enthusiastic about aliens but instead resigned to visitations.
He gives the Barretts a straightforward questionnaire to determine if they are targets of the Gray aliens. I like how Pollard’s theory about the Grays is logical and mundane: Their behavior makes as much sense to us as human scientists’ behavior makes sense to lab rats.
Building to something
“Dark Skies” – never a bad film, but arguably an unoriginal one — pays off on its slow build starting with Pollard’s explanation. The final act is not an overblown flurry of sights and sounds. Even though it is a battle between the Grays and the Barretts, we can’t predict what’s going to happen.
For one thing, even with Daniel rigging his house with cameras “Paranormal Activity”-style, we don’t precisely know how the aliens move about. In addition to the ratcheting creepiness, Stewart shows his horror bona fides through quick, chilling images such as a black inhuman shape standing over a kid’s bed. New parents might find this particularly frightening.
“Dark Skies” isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s scarier than its ilk in the subgenre of a family menaced by an outside force, such as “Poltergeist,” “The Darkness” and “Before I Wake.” You won’t be blown away by new concepts, but you likewise won’t be bored.