I loved Dark Skies, starring The Americans’ (I only saw one season to date) Keri Russell. Dark Skies was like Signs, but more depressing (that is a complement)! Dark Skies is about a suburban family in dire financial straits. Mom is a real estate agent with the worst inventories and does not have the desire to hoodwink unsuspecting families. Dad was downsized. The family is trying to keep up appearances with the neighbors. They have two kids so when things start getting weird, and they begin to suspect that the kids are acting out, but they can’t afford a therapist to fix it. Then it becomes apparent that the kids aren’t to blame, but to outsiders, it plausibly looks like the parents have finally succumb to financial pressures and are taking it out on the kids. What do you do?
Dark Skies’ most terrifying themes are the idea that you have no control over your own body/life, and the child abuse accusations. Dark Skies correctly emphasizes that life still goes on even if you are a lab rat. Keri Russell is so credible as a determined mom defending her family, and it does not even feel like Josh Hamilton is acting. Hamilton is the father. Dark Skies was a great sci-fi film with disaster movie tropes of the need to unify the family in the face of a crisis, and I heartily recommend it to fans of the genre.
Other reviewers complained that Dark Skies is too derivative of other movies to which I reply, “So?” Dark Skies’ story is solid, and forty-five minutes pass before the root of their problems is verbally referenced even though the audience can see it coming from a mile away. Dark Skies is a slow burn like John Carpenter’s Halloween. For people who complain about the twist at the end, you should have seen it coming. There were plenty of hints that you missed, but I caught and was still surprised.
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If you were outraged by the twist, you were not paying close attention to Dark Skies. The wife and husband keep mentioning that the older son was always sick and then randomly got better. The older son also reassures the younger son that he would be kidnapped, not the little brother. Also the aliens are creepily tapped into the older son’s sexual desires. After he has his first kiss, they stalk him on the street and turn off the streetlights as he rides his bike. Also in their hallucination projected for him, they use the porn that he watches as the setting. I applaud Dark Skies for at least subliminally addressing sexual abuse of young boys, which is often neglected or at worst joked about or applauded as sexual prowess in public discourse.
The older son does act out, though not in the way that his parents think. He hangs out with the bad kids, verbally lashes out at his parents, and though it is considered normal for boys to use porn to learn about sex, Dark Skies creates some tension when the girl that he is interested in has to set him straight regarding what is acceptable and what is not, something that victims of sexual abuse have to struggle with when they begin to have appropriate romantic relationships. Dark Skies does not pull any punches. The parents, though loving and willing, are clueless and unable to protect their children.
The aliens are seen as predators (joke unintended). The early imagery of one of the sons playing with a lizard is a type of torture that only amplifies as Dark Skies unfolds. Silent screaming and being unable to control your body, i.e. freezing, are normal physical phenomenon for rape victims. They needlessly take the screws out of the wood while already in the home. The point of their experiment is cruelty and power.
Dark Skies also had some other nice touches. I noted that the aliens invaded the family home and kidnapped the older son on the fourth of July. The Poltergeist shout out with the TV and walkie-talkies were suitably creepy. I felt bad that the dog finally found a forever home unaware that he was being hired to deal with aliens. The best casting ever was J.K. Simmons as an alien Hunter S. Thompson type. Simmons makes every extraterrestrial theory credible. The cats were a nice touch.
I was a little aggravated that the family figured out that they should stick together then separated. Honestly if you can’t control your body, and aliens have travelled light years to mess with you, you don’t stand a chance even if you stay in the same room, I can’t stay mad. I also wondered what the neighbors thought was happening.
The final scenes where the family is under siege and still trying to share tender moments with each other were poignant, particularly after so much strife and division. If those are the final memories that the older son had, hopefully they provided some peace. Dark Skies’ ending is so magnificently bleak and hopeless that it was definitely nipping at the heels of The Mist. I unashamedly adored Dark Skies.