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83Dark Skies is about the fragility of family, a muted meditation on how precious it is...it does affirm that genre filmmakers who work with their eyes, their hearts and their brains still walk among us.
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67More chilling than terrifying, this movie’s predatory aliens are creatures that mostly mess with people’s heads prior to abducting them.
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67While there are some scares along the way, Stewart foolishly gives away the whole kit and caboodle plot-wise with an opening quotation from Arthur C. Clarke.
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63Mostly, though, it all ends up feeling like a lost, minor episode of “The X-Files:” A little scary, a little silly and catnip for those who want to believe.
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Mar 25, 201360As a shocker, Scott Stewart’s (Priest) film is solid, but it’s the thoroughly depressing backdrop that you’ll take away.
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Feb 26, 201360The real mystery of Dark Skies isn’t who’s pulling the paranormal pranks — it’s lanky visitors from above, not vengeful spirits from beyond — but why Dimension is treating this reasonably effective potboiler like something that should be hidden away at Area 51.
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60In the end, a pretty good buildup to OK payoff without any real surprises en route makes Dark Skies feel just enough above average to make one wish it had one memorable spark of conceptual inspiration up its sleeve.
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Feb 23, 201360Dark Skies certainly parades textbook genre trappings...But those elements are employed with consummate dexterity.
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58Good horror films are imprinted by the fears and anxieties of the day, converting real-life atrocities into abstracted scares; mediocre ones are imprinted, too, but with trends and commercial formulas. If Dark Skies resurfaced on TV or brain implant 20 or 30 years from now, horror fans would be able to carbon-date the film almost to the month.
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Feb 26, 201350Approaching the first half of the film fairly conventionally, Stewart then misses the opportunity to capitalize on shifting to more full-on genre mode.
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50The movie builds a moderate, if less than monumental, level of spookiness, regardless of your ignorance. It’s a workmanlike piece of suspense.
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50Alien abductions are a truly terrifying idea, and building an alien abduction movie on the template of "Poltergeist" is a great idea. But "Poltergeist" had one thing Dark Skies is sorely in need of: follow-through.
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50It’s a passably chilling bit of nonsense that builds on the past, the tropes of the genre, and relies on them for the odd jolt and the occasional ironic laugh.
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40The pacing is so tedious and the action so unexciting that it's a real thrill when J.K. Simmons shows up as a wry alien expert — and a huge disappointment when he disappears a few minutes later.
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40Really the biggest problem with Dark Skies is that Stewart can never quite decide just what story he is telling — a slow-burn horror parable or paranoid invasion flick — or whether to focus on this character or that, instead struggling to string together scares regardless of how they fit together overall.
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Feb 22, 201338Dark Skies is a bore that even the most forgiving genre buffs will find difficult to defend or endure.
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38Scott Stewart's Dark Skies is the definitive horror film for the Tea Party era.
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Feb 21, 201338The characters are reluctant to believe in the face of overwhelming evidence, mostly because writer-director Scott Stewart doesn’t want to play his hand too early. By the time the movie is over, it’s easy to see why he kept his cards close to his chest. He’s not really holding anything.