By Jeremy Hannaford (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: March 6, 2013
While watching Dark Skies, I couldn’t help but think about the horror genre in general and how it has skyrocketed in both popularity and box office revenue. I thought about all the tricks and scares that films like the Paranormal Activity series, Insidious and others have used to lure people in and make themselves memorable. All of them were better than this movie.
Dark Skies follows the similar path of all scare-at-home movies, with a bizarre and lame attempt to freshen up the series. The idea of being scared in the one place you should feel safe is literally slamming into your in the face in the opening minutes. For some kicks, I imagined that I had seen no information about this film pertaining to trailers or advertisements. What I saw was in fact the exact same formula that I had seen time and time again over the past few years. A cantankerous family begins to experience strange and chilling events in their house. From puzzling item stacking in the kitchen to the younger children speaking with an unknown being, one would believe that they are in fact watching a horror film based on a ghost or demon.
So when it is revealed that the mysterious entity harassing the family are aliens, everything we were lead to believe makes no sense. When we begin to rethink about everything that had happened prior, we are left with only one conclusion. That E.T. has come back and is a massive jerk! Everything that made sense as a spiritual horror film is torn to sunders when faced with the psychical reality of alien beings and the film doesn’t seem to care. Appearing and disappearing, unable to be seen on camera and effecting the local wildlife are signs we have seen that point to demonic forces. Now they point to aliens, apparently.
This cut and paste story line really shows how studios are trying anything to make people come see the same type of movie over and over again. The lack of originality is evident as we watch things get progressively worse and worse for the characters. Surprisingly enough however, despite being a 90+ minute feature, it moves along incredibly slow. Due to the predictability of the script and rather mundane characters, this makes what should be a quick thrill a snail race. The random acts of harassment or bodily control just seem silly when you know that aliens are behind it all. Their rather complicated acts of terror truly act as filler until they finally attempt their kidnapping of the family.
Before the film starts, we are given a quote, quite possibly the most famous quote in all of science fiction literature. From Arthur C. Clarke, the quote reads as “Two possibilities exist; either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” Never does Dark Skies ever reach the same impact and intense thought provoking tension as this quote. This film doesn’t embrace this logic, nor does it even question the ideology of its intent. They literally just slapped it in at the beginning to try and create tension without actually understanding what they were putting into the film.
