Director: Victor Danell
Writers: Victor Danell, Jimmy Nivrén Olsson
Stars: Inez Dahl Torhaug, Jesper Barkselius, Sara Shirpey
Synopsis: A rebellious teenager who believes her missing father was abducted by aliens joins forces with a quirky UFO club of endearing misfits. They embark on a high-stakes adventure that defies the law and challenges the very fabric of reality.
There is a disclaimer here for people watching Watch the Skies in the US or other English speaking countries. For the US release, the filmmakers partnered with a company called Flawless, which takes AI tools and does a process they call visual dubbing. The cast is still speaking their lines and, since many of the cast members also speak English, they are also delivering those lines. Yet, instead of the dialogue and the movements of the actor’s mouth not matching like with traditional dubbing, Flawless has developed processes to make the voice and the mouth on screen sync. The technology also works for written language on screen, so any important written ideas are also available in the viewer’s language.
That being the case, the real question is, can you tell? The answer is if you’re looking for it, yes, but it is rare that a mouth is in an uncanny position. It’s honestly a little worse on the ears. Because of the dubbed dialogue, the sound of voices is always crisp and nearly always audible. There isn’t the layering that occurs with sound captured on a film set, so like with other dubbing, the vocal track doesn’t perfectly match the scene and so it feels otherworldly with these subtleties. For those of us that are cinema purists it’s a bit of a let down as we don’t mind that “one-inch tall barrier of subtitles,” to quote filmmaker Bong Joon-ho. Yet, for those that create exciting films with universal themes in their own language, this is a way to really reach a broader audience who would otherwise eschew a foreign made film. With that being written, though, how is the movie?
Watch the Skies evokes the golden age of the late 20th century adventure story. It features a group that stumbles upon a conspiracy theory, a shady government organization, and unexplained phenomena that makes us question all that we hold as truth. It’s a fantastically well executed story that has inaccessible science explained in layman’s terms mixed with incredible visuals.
Co-writer, co-editor, and director Victor Danell has a panache when it comes to filmmaking. His feature is Speilbergian in the scope of his project and the heart he injects into it. With co-writer Jimmy Nivrén Olsson, Danell has created a story that feels familiar, but never the same as everything it is influenced by. There is an excitement for scientific curiosity and a complicated familial relationship at its core that really sings through the film.
The only disappointing aspect of the script is the interpersonal relationships. It often feels like the characters are doing or saying something to strain their relationships artificially. They don’t talk with each other enough about their feelings and in some ways it rings false. The personal resolution of the final frames feels diluted in a way because it’s hard to believe in such a short amount of time these people would have formed a bond that would supersede the slights suffered within the action of the film.
Watch the Skies can be forgiven for this disappointment because it is so thrilling. There is a sequence as UFO Sweden, the group investigating the unexplained phenomena, really ramps up their operations. They attach a magnet to a raft and slowly row it out to a lake that is the crash site of what they hope is a UFO. Once they have something attached to the magnet, the team tries to reel it in with a winch. There’s shouts as the truck with the winch begins to move and the object gets closer. The butting heads come to the fore as the group notices that the UFO is an IFO (identified flying object) and not what they hoped, but Denise (Inez Dahl Torhaug) will not give up. It’s a taut sequence with a lot of shots edited expertly by Danell and co-editor Fredrik Morhedon and beautifully composed by cinematographer Hannes Krantz who is a director of photography who really knows how to shoot in the dark.
In spite of complicated feelings about the use of AI, Watch the Skies is worth the price of admission. It has that feeling of when you were a kid at the movies and you saw something that made you want to find out the mysteries of the universe. It has that spark of adventure and the filmmaking acumen to go along with it. It’s a film meant for the big screen and hopefully with its slight augmentation will reach a much wider and enthusiastic audience.
