Dark Skies: Movie Review

"Dark Skies" feels like a mixed bag of different elements from what's doing good in cinema nowadays. There's definitely some Spielberg-esque scifi side to it and even some horrific elements that up the ante in terms of suspense and fear. Unfortunately, "Dark Skies" fails to coalesce these various elements into a cohesive whole. The film fails to make any compelling headway for both the horror and scifi genres and instead makes out to be one generic experience.

The Barrett family - father Daniel (Josh Hamilton), mother Lacy (Keri Russell), oldest son Jesse (Dakota Goyo) and youngest son Sammy (Kadan Rockett) - host a barbecue and invite their friends, the over. At night, Jesse and Sammy communicate with each other from their beds via walkie-talkie. Jesse is reading scary stories about The Sandman, which frightens Sammy. That same night, Lacy wakes up to find out that their fridge has been ransacked. The family finds it weird that the culprit (or an animal as they believe) only ate vegetables and left everything else untouched. The next night, Lacy again finds their kitchen touched. As more unexplained and unexplicable stuff occur the days after and as the family struggles to explain what's happening to them, the only conclusion they can deduce is that whatever is playing with them is out of this world.

Looking back, "Dark Skies" lost its glimmer with a generic story and subpar acting. Generic in terms of its plot and story development. It even has the "let's find an expert over the internet" plot device that is so heavily used in the horror genre. Let's just say that "Dark Skies" is extremely similar to most horror films the past few years - just with a scientific twist. It also doesn't help that the acting was subpar - as stale as the story. What we truly loved with "Dark Skies" though is its cinematography and atmosphere. The film is surprisingly scary at times and the disturbing imagery adds to the bone chilling sensation. Too bad everything else sucked.

Rating: 2 reels





Why you should watch it:
- the atmosphere is truly scary at times

Why you shouldn't watch it:
- story falls flat in the end
- subpar acting