Film Review: Dark Skies

The main trouble with horror films these days is predictability. Classics such as Rosemary’s Baby, Psycho and The Exorcist were particularly disturbing because audiences didn’t know what to expect – plots were carefully unraveled, suspense and tension were delicately sustained and, most importantly, the audience had no idea what on earth was going to happen next as they were left in the dark just as much as the suffering protagonists. But now it seems that many horrors simply adopt a copy-and-paste formula, interchanging the threat each time but each resulting with the same tale. And Dark Skies is sadly no exception.

The hardest part of watching Dark Skies is wading through the obligatory exposition. You’ve heard the tortured cliché before: paranormal threat terrorizes a middle-class suburban family. Yawn. Although this is given the interesting subplot of the parents suffering financial problems, Dark Skies has to also get through the compulsory ‘It’s behind you!’ scenes of sinister figures standing behind our protagonists and scenes where a protagonist ventures slowly through their home in the middle of the night to see some strange activity taking place. It’s like Paranormal Activity-Lite, even down to the eventual CCTV sequences. Add some dodgy CGI, flickering electrics, typical sequences of protagonists slowly approaching something (which turns out to be nothing spooky at all) and some creepy children for good measure and you have yourself one complete set of overused horror plot points. However, whilst the nighttime sequences are duller than those of the aforementioned ghostly quadrilogy, the daytime scenes improve upon them as the family unit slowly crumbles (although the execution can be plodding at times).

But as the family tries to slowly unravel the mystery of the strange occurrences around their home, the experience becomes increasingly frustrating when the audience already knows that aliens are the answer. It’s like when survivors in some zombie movies have no idea what zombies are, even though zombie media exists already. Haven’t any of them ever caught a Roswell documentary or seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Even if they’ve never heard of the term ‘Grays’ before, tales of alien encounters have been fairly common in magazines and newspapers for decades. It’s only when a cameo from the reliable J.K. Simmons as an alien expert occurs that the parents realize what’s happening to them – and by then the audience had already figured this out over an hour ago.

Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton have decent chemistry as bickering parents Lacy and Daniel Barrett, and Dakota Goyo and Kadan Rockett add some creepy moments as kids Jesse and Sammy but they can’t save the film from its clumsy execution. Dark Skies becomes an aggravating experience when you know that with all its well-built dramatic sequences, it ends up simply becoming a forgettable, average horror outing.

It’s by no means a terrible film, but it’s certainly a bland and predictable one that you won’t remember long after. Despite the genuine spookiness in certain scenes, Dark Skies is a disappointing entry in an already saturated genre. Horror films can’t follow a formula for too long, they have to break the mold and surprise the audience or else they become completely stale. Unfortunately, Dark Skies just doesn’t go the extra mile to make it really stand out as a definitive extra-terrestrial horror. Stick to Alien.