Dark Skies – CBF Review

If only it were that simple.

I only watched it because Keri Russell is in it and The Americans is finished for the season.

I got what I came for.

It’s a pretty stock standard “strange things happen in an escalating fashion to suburban family” movie. Keri and her family face increasingly bizarre occurrences, which they eventually attribute to aliens. After being sufficiently freaked out and trying to fight back against the inevitable abduction of one of their kids, they identify the wrong child as the aliens’ target and the other one gets taken. Aww. A final scene shows that the abducted son might still be alive and have some chance of returning.

I hate this movie because there is nothing adventurous about it at all; they don’t put their Insidious and Sinister pedigree to good use and try to leave (it’s made apparent that leaving probably wouldn’t help, but at least give it a shot, guys); and JK Simmons plays an alien conspiracy theorist whose job is to dump the entire load of the film’s exposition in a single scene. Classy.

But it’s not all bad because Keri Russell is good, as always; the early occurrences have a Poltergeist quality to them (and most of them are genuinely creepy); and the ending gets to be twisty without being drainingly bleak. That’s refreshing.

Verdict: 2 out of 5 stars.

The creep factor is high, but it’s a bland affair otherwise.

To be fair, an aneurysm probably beats alien abduction.