Dark Skies Information

Dark Skies is a 2013 American science fiction horror film written and directed by Scott Stewart and produced by Jason Blum starring Keri Russell, Josh Hamilton and Dakota Goyo.

The film was released on February 22, 2013.

Plot

The Barrett family - Father Daniel (Josh Hamilton), Mother Lacy (Keri Russell), oldest son Jesse (Dakota Goyo), and youngest son Sammy (Kadan Rockett) - hosts a barbecue and invite their friends, the Jessops, 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.

Lacy wakes up during the night and checks on her boys before heading down to the kitchen where she discovers the fridge standing open with its contents spread out all over the floor. The backdoor is also wide open. The next day, she and Daniel believe an animal broke in, although Lacy questions why the vegetables were eaten while the meat remained untouched.

Daniel has a job interview which doesn't go well, and he receives a notice in the mail that their mortgage payment is late. That night, Lacy wakes up and heads down to the kitchen. She discovers all of their canned and packaged foods stacked up in towers all over the kitchen counters, floor, and table. The chandelier above the dinning table also appears to project a strange sign on the ceiling. She brushes it off as a nightmare and in the morning the police come to check all of the doors and windows to see if there was a break in, but find nothing. The next night, the alarm is set off, waking up the entire family. Daniel shuts off the alarm and notices that all doors and windows are still locked. The alarm company calls and believes it to be a malfunction in the system because it shows that all entry points into the house were breached at the exact same time. The alarm company sends over a technician in the morning who determines that nothing was breached and that it was a simple malfunction.

The number of strange events begins to increase in frequency and danger. While Sammy is playing soccer with the other kids, he wets himself and becomes catatonic. Lacy, who is at home, witnesses 3 flocks of birds crashing into their house. At night, Lacy is awoken by a sound and hears Sammy talking. When she goes to check on him, she sees a figure standing over his bed. She screams and turns on the light only to find an empty room. Daniel and Lacy run around the house trying to find Sammy, when Daniel sees him in the front yard walking away from the house. They retrieve him. The next day, Lacy has a viewing at a house for sale. As she's pitching the house to a couple, she becomes unable to speak and enters a trance. She walks towards the glass door and begins to bash her head repeatedly against it before waking up in her own bed. She finds a bruise forming on her forehead and notices that she blacked out for 6 hours. She also finds a picture that Sammy drew of a boy and three grey figures holding hands beside a house with dead birds on the ground. That night, Lacy wakes up around midnight and finds Daniel standing in the backyard in a catatonic state. His nose begins to bleed heavily. He wakes up with no memory of what happened.

Sammy goes to the pool with the Jessops the next day but refuses to go swimming. Shelly (Annie Thurman), attempts to take off his shirt and discovers a strange formation of bruises all over his chest. Jesse and his friend Ratner (L. J. Benet) sneak into the woods behind a golf course where Ratner shoots at Jesse with a pellet gun. Jesse freezes in a standing position and has a seizure that causes his eyes to roll back into his head. He is taken to the hospital, where the doctors inform Lacy and Daniel that Jesse is covered in strange symbols that had to have been branded onto his body. Sammy is returned and the Jessops now believe that the Barretts are abusing their children.

That night, Daniel finds the cameras he set up have become blurry and and turned to static in Sammy's room. He runs upstairs and finds Sammy with no eyes. He returns to look at the footage of the camera, going frame by frame until he sees 3 dark figures standing over the beds of everyone in the family. He now believes Lacy's claim that there is an extraterrestrial force at work. They seek the help of a specialist, Edwin Pollard (J. K. Simmons), who calls the beings "The Grays". Pollard informs them that there are 3 of these aliens, and that many have suffered the same fate as the Barretts, with most cases ending in a child abduction. He warns them that they should be hyper-protective of their child, who has has been "chosen" and that they must work together in order to save their son. He states that sickness and nosebleeds are signs, as is the drawing that Lacy discovered.

Daniel goes out and buys a shotgun and boards up the windows of the house. Not long after, the door and windows light up and the boards shake, as the Grays come for them. Lacy sends Jesse into his room with Sammy and tells him not to take his eyes off of his brother. She stands outside the door with a knife in hand. The power shuts off but the TV in her bedroom turns on. She walks towards it, unaware of a Gray behind her, and becomes trapped in her room. Daniel fires into the bright light, hoping to hit one of the Grays. He manages to get Jesse and Sammy into his and Lacy's room and they move a dresser in front of the door. They huddle together when Jesse blacks out and finds himself in the foreclosed house from earlier in the film. He finds his mother dead before witnessing his father commit suicide. Seeing his brother, he chases after Sammy before reawakening in the upstairs hallway of his house. Daniel, Lacy, and Sammy are all together, staring at Jesse in concern and bewilderment. The Grays appear in front of Jesse, there is flash of light, and he is abducted.

Three months later, Lacy and Daniel are suspects in Jesse's disappearance and they've moved into an apartment. Pollard cuts up a newspaper article about Jesse's disappearance and hangs it on his wall. As Lacy is going through old things, she finds pictures that Jesse drew as a child that involved three grey figures holding his hand in front of a house. Lacy realizes that illness was one of the symptoms of the Grays and remembers that Jesse was sick for the longest time as a child. She comes to understand that Jesse was the one at risk, and not Sammy. As she realizes this, the walkie-talkie begins to go off with feedback and she hears Jesse's voice saying "They're coming".

Cast

• Keri Russell as Lacy Barrett
• Josh Hamilton as Daniel Barrett
• Dakota Goyo as Jesse Barrett
• Kadan Rockett as Sam Barrett
• J. K. Simmons as Edwin Pollard
• L. J. Benet as Kevin Ratner
• Rich Hutchman as Mike Jessop
• Myndy Crist as Karen Jessop
• Annie Thurman as Shelly Jessop
• Jack Washburn as Bobby Jessop
• Ron Ostrow as Richard Klein
• Brian Stepanek as Security system technician
• Judith Moreland as Janice Rhodes
• Trevor St. John as Alex Holcombe

Production

Production commenced on August 3, 2012. Locations for filming included Los Angeles. The film was directed by Scott Stewart and produced by Jason Blum, Jeanette Brill and Couper Samuelson. The film's screenplay was written by Stewart; the original script by Stewart took about six weeks to finish writing.

Release

Dark Skies was released in the United States on February 22, 2013 and will be in the United Kingdom on April 5, 2013.

Reception

Dark Skies holds a 30% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 47 reviews, and a 48% rating on Metacritic based on 13 reviews. Michael O'Sullivan of The Washington Post wrote that "[t]he movie builds a moderate, if less than monumental, level of spookiness, regardless of your ignorance. It's a workmanlike piece of suspense." He gave the film 2 out of 4 stars. Writing for The New York Times was Andy Webster, who said that the film was "employed with consummate dexterity".

See also