Some types of movies (fantasy, for instance) don’t interest me much, but anything with an alien is bound to coax me to a theater.  What struck me about Dark Skies is the feeling of deja vu, the impression that I’ve seen it before.  That is because Dark Skies is like the evil twin, or doppelgänger, of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  If Steven Spielberg’s aliens had been sadistic kidnappers (oh wait, some of them were!) then Scott Stewart wouldn’t have had to make this movie at all.

The focus of Dark Skies is on one family, the Barretts.  Dad (Josh Hamilton) is out of work, Mom (Keri Russell) is a down-on-her-luck realtor and the two kids (Dakota Goyo and Kadan Rockett) are just pretty normal kids.  That is, until their shiny suburban home suddenly turns into Spook Central.  Creepy stuff happens to all of them at one time or another, and eventually they come to believe that aliens are out to grab the youngest boy.  That unites the family when, at the climax, the mysterious Grays make their move.

As a slowly-paced horror opus, Scott Stewart’s film is eerie and effective.  Most movies of this ilk lose their power when the boogeyman is revealed; then the horror becomes not only comprehensible but unimaginative.  But the Gray aliens sustain their spookiness because they aren’t on screen very much and their motives remain obfuscated.  The story pokes along rather slowly, but Stewart’s script does a good job of building character.  Where it goes wrong, in my opinion, is trying to force a secret onto the characters (and the audience) at the climax with nothing depicted earlier to support it.  The big surprise does come as a shock, but only because the writer-director cheats by not revealing clues about it as the story develops.

This is one of those movies that, once it really gets going, seems pretty effective, but doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny a couple of hours afterward.  It isn’t bad of its type, but it should have been a good deal better, considering the superb Spielberg template waiting to be flipped.  Perhaps it serves best as a mirror reflecting the political malaise of our time, particularly the overpowering feeling that there is simply not much one can do when the world seems to be collapsing around us.  In this regard, Scott Stewart’s film is downright prescient.  ☆ ☆ 1/2.  27 February 2013.