WATCH THE SKIES and a Bit of Boomer Rage

WATCH THE SKIES (Blu-ray)

2022 / 116 min

Decal Releasing

Review by Stinky the Destroyer😿

It’s with a profound sense of rage that I review Watch the Skies.

Not that it’s terrible or anything. For a low budget science-fiction film clearly inspired by the likes of Stranger Things and early Spielberg with a little Interstellar tossed in, it’s a fairly entertaining way to kill a couple of hours. Inez Dahl Torhaug plays Denise, a snotty teenager whose UFO-obsessed father went missing years earlier. Convinced he was abducted, she uses her considerable tech smarts to pinpoint the location of the alleged UFO that whisked him away. 

Denise recruits - more like demands - the help of Dad’s old group of likeminded looneys, UFO Sweden, now led by disgraced scientist Lennart Svahn (Jesper Barkselius), who suspects the people who once employed him are covering-up alien influenced weather anomalies. So they steal a hard drive containing all their files related to the night Denise’s Dad disappeared. 

The story is kind of meandering at times, but there are some interesting ideas here and there (some of them borrowed). I do like the whole time-altering wormhole aspect of the narrative, though it tends to negate the purpose of the title. However, it would have helped if the main protagonist was more likable and sympathetic. She is generally awful to everybody, including the one character, police officer Tomi (Sara Shirpey), who appears to care about her. Still, it’s an enjoyable film overall, if not particularly original.

Spotted shoplifting.

But here’s the big problem (for me, anyway). Watch the Skies is a Swedish film, shot in Sweden with Swedish actors. However, it has been dubbed using AI to alter the facial and mouth movements of the characters to make them appear to be speaking English. Worse yet, director Victor Danell boasts about it (in a bonus feature) as if he’s breaking new cinematic ground.

No, Victor, you are not. What you are doing is dumbing down your movie for mouthbreathers to lazy to read subtitles. I’ve never seen a foreign film made better with dubbing, to say nothing of AI dubbing. You should have enough faith in your own work to offer it abroad as is. You are also setting a bad precedent. This is more than just lazily entrusting AI to create imagery…you’re using it to alter the performances of your actors. What’s next…having a computer spit out your next screenplay? 

Maybe I sound like a crusty old Boomer watching the skies to yell at clouds, but the idea of foreign films being digitally manipulated to look and sound more American leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And where does it stop? At the rate AI use (and abuse) is growing, we could be getting Adam Sandler movies for centuries. But I digress…most people probably don’t actually care who (or what) creates the stuff they enjoy. While Watch the Skies is entertaining enough, is this really the direction we want movies to go?

EXTRA KIBBLES

SWEDISH LANGUAGE VERSION - The way it should be seen.

FEATURETTES - Filmmaker Testimonial features everyone boasting how great and groundbreaking their use of AI is; Flawless Sizzle Reel (Flawless is the company that did the AI dubbing); The Real UFO Sweden is a brief feature on the real life UFO hunters.

TRAILER