Watch the Skies should be an important lesson, especially for younger movie goers. When you see that a film is “science fiction” there can be an expectation that the film has some insane space battle, or some wild exotic creature, or Christopher Nolan. But great science fiction doesn’t have to have any of those things: just a really great idea, and some interesting characters having that idea. You heard me, Chris! You can have the Odyssey…I’ll settle for watching the skies while I wait in the meantime.
After the 1970s prologue, we’re in the mid 1990s following the orphaned Denise (Inez Dahl Torhaug). She’s your classic sci-fi sullen teenager…with incredible tech skills and a loose affiliation with following the rules, pissing off her unofficial police officer watcher, Tomi (Sara Shirpey). Denise shakes from her drifting through life existence when a car hurtles through the roof of a Swedish farm near her little town. Random right? Well, maybe not random…because this car happens to look, and feel, exactly like the car her lost father was driving on the night he disappeared. Denise goes for help to UFO Sweden, an underground weather monitoring group led by Lennart Svahn (Jesper Barkselius)…who also happen to have been very close friends with Denise’s father, and share his enthusiasm for doing what the title says.
Props to Victor Danell, the writer director of Watch the Skies. By minute 10, I realized he was trying to create his Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That’s a bold swing, channeling one of the great movies from one of the world’s great directors. Fortunately, he’s tapped into the essence of what makes a movie like that special. He walks this fine line, almost like a horror movie, of maintaining the mystery as long as possible, to propel his movie forward. Along the way, he’s growing and evolving his characters on the DL. By the end, even if you’re not completely invested in Denise’s teenage rebellion, the eclectic lovable UFO Sweden team members get fleshed out and realized, even the older, cynical Gunnar (Hakan Ehn). So even if the big third act scope change is hard to follow for you, or you think is really stupid, Watch the Skies actually has you watch within, as you become immersed in Denise, Gunnar, Lennart, et al, and hope for the best for these new friends you’ve just made.
Thankfully, the sci-fi elements aren’t that stupid, except one. Like his story, Victor Danell uses the famous stories of old to create a new pastiche of sci-fi elements to tell his tale. The little specific mixture of past-futuristic technology makes the movie fun, like Windows 95’s importance, alternate uses for Game Boys, and bombshell plot twists involving IP addresses. If Watch the Skies were made in 1995, this would all be gobbledygook for the novice audience; decades of computer understanding make these little choices nostalgically entertaining. For the big third act, Danelle uses concepts any sci-fi movie fan has seen, fitting like puzzle pieces nicely into a slightly more recent period setting. It’s dense, but not overwhelming, and if you’ve been paying attention you should follow along with what’s happening, which thankfully is grounded in the characters you’re invested in first and foremost. The big exception though sadly is probably how this movie will be remembered. Watch the Skies is the first movie to use AI to dub voiceover. I get that maybe the movie might have been a harder sell in the US if it were Swedish, but the dubbing here feels like watching M3GAN, one too many layers removed from naturalistic conversation that makes it another obstacle to overcome and engage with the film. Fortunately the story is strong enough that it overcomes this, um, enhancement, but it could be a dealbreaker for others, sadly.
So, release the Swedish cut! I would love to see Watch the Skies in it’s purest form. The heart on display here is the type of pure sci-fi experience that will remain with you long after the movie ends. That is, until M3GAN shows up and murders me by questioning her abilities to connect with humans. Win some, lose some, I guess.