“Since 1970 a rogue group known as UFO Sweden has been investigating unexplained phenomena. This story is inspired by that determination to answer humanity’s ultimate question: Are we alone?”
Watch The Skies was originally released in Sweden, and it wasn’t in English. The filmmakers discovered there was a process out there that could make their film more globally accessible. Many foreign language films find their way to film critics, and while we might have a better tolerance for subtitles, it can still take away from the experience. While dubbing can also be very much a distraction, I find that if I must read the dialog, I’m not able to notice the subtleties of filmmaking such as cinematography, performances, production design, and other elements that build atmosphere and make many of these films the great gems they might be. Now there’s an alternative that is being experimented with here. Through CGI and motion capture, the actors’ lips can be altered so that they appear to be mouthing the English words. Gone will be the days of the 1970’s badly-dubbed low-budget martial arts films. In some ways I’ll be sorry to see that go, just for the nostalgic value those films retain. I can tell you that the technology works quite well, and it fooled me completely. So I can hear the dialog in a language I understand and still be able to enjoy the film’s nuance. I’m all for it, and Watch The Skies now out on Blu-ray might be worth the purchase price just to experience the new technology.
“The old man’s been watching too many X-Files, if you ask me.”
As the film begins, we’re taken back to 1988. Uno (Toringe) is an obsessed UFO investigator. He’s in the middle of stealing highly classified documents that a friend has smuggled out of the facility of a company that has classified data that he believes will lead him to a crashed alien spacecraft. He has his very young daughter along for the heist, and it goes badly, and he leaves his friends to pay the consequences. He uses the data and sets out in a mountain area to see if his calculations and the stolen data can lead him to the ship. He disappears and is not heard from again, leaving his daughter to grow up without her dad.
Jump to 1996, and his daughter Denise (Torhaug) is still looking for her father. When a car that appears to be his shows up crashing through the roof of an isolated barn, she thinks this is the sign she has been waiting for. She approaches her father’s old friends and the organization they call UFO Sweden. They have given up the fight. They now just provide the easiest answer to folks who contact them. When she shows up, she starts to inspire them to be what they once were. Of course, they don’t all have the warmest feelings for her father after he kind of left them out in the cold.
“To believe is one thing. To know is entirely different.”
The film follows their effort to obtain classified information and find the ship. Of course, not everyone likes the new direction for the group. Lennart (Barkselius) lost his job and scientific credibility over the 1988 heist. He’s bitter, but Denise has a passion that ropes him and most of the others right in. Tona (Kyed) is the chain-smoking driver. Gunner (Ehn) is the eldest member of the group, and he doesn’t like what’s going on at all. He tries to sway the others away from getting sucked into Denise’s crazy plans and finds ways to sabotage or betray the group. But Denise isn’t really a sympathetic character at all. She lies and connives to get their support and breaks their hearts when they discover how deceptive she has truly been. You understand her wanting to find her father, but she is single-minded. She has a friend and protector in police officer Tomi (Shirpey) who believes it is the group sucking her into their craziness.
The film pretty much plays out like a foreign film X-Files episode with Denise being the Mulder in the group. There are some interesting twists and turns, but the ending betrays all of the film’s setup. We get something like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar where the “science” makes some tangent that takes us far away from where we think we are going. But it’s not a clever twist. I’m not sure it’s a twist at all. It gets lazy at the end and moves toward f/x and big action when that wasn’t really what made the story work in the start. Denise is on a True Grit kind of mission, and she ropes these people into that mission, and the intimate “who knows what’s out there” vibe keeps the film interesting and at times even a bit compelling. But it’s a turn that changes everything about what the film even means. There are a few short extras with the most important being the original Swedish version of the film.
In the end it’s not much more than what we’ve seen before that fights what it really is in the end, and that’s unfortunate. I guess you could say: “Knowing is one thing. Believing is something entirely different.”
