While it may seem like it’s following in the footsteps of many UFO movies before it, Watch The Skies diverges from the path by leading viewers to become far more invested in the lives of its characters down on planet Earth.
★★★★☆
Watch The Skies, originally named UFO Sweden, may initially appear to be another family sci-fi romp. However, it carries a more existential air than its predecessors, and clearly knows that its power lies in how many questions it can leave you with rather than how many it will answer. The film follows teenage troublemaker Denise (Inez Dahl Torhaug), embittered by the disappearance of her UFO fanatic father when she was younger. After she discovers a possession that should’ve disappeared when he did, Denise ends up seeking help from the very UFO group her father had become estranged from, led by the stuffy but well-meaning Lennart (Jesper Barkselius).
The soundtrack for the film is nicely selected, with the bittersweet sound of Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’, a song belonging to Denise and her father, punctuating the most poignant moments. The title seems to be a nice nod to this song, too, or vice versa—”Heaven can wait, we’re only watching the skies,” the song proclaims.
The film’s cinematography is striking from the beginning, often lit in shades of red and amber that starkly contrast the usual sterile white or green of a UFO film. Set across the 80s and 90s, its timeline and colour palette have drawn some comparison to recent sci-fi/fantasy shows such as Stranger Things. However, unlike much family adventure fare, Watch The Skies chooses to place Denise not with a ragtag group of kids her own age but a group of stargazers of all ages, a mismatched group reminiscent of the BBC’s Detectorists. This shifts the character dynamics in a way that sets it apart—particularly compelling is the almost fatherly relationship that Lennart begins to build with Denise.
While there is a good rapport between the members of UFO Sweden, some more development of the characters outside of the group might have helped spur the film along. Local police officer Tomi, for example, has known Denise since she was a child, and pursues the group with a surprisingly aggressive determination, seemingly in an effort to keep Denise safe and stop her from falling afoul of the law. However, we know next to nothing about their relationship over all these years, and this muddies the waters when it comes to figuring out if Tomi is doing this for Denise or for herself.
That said, the core characters are impressively well-developed within a genre that often traps itself into spending much of the runtime on worldbuilding. While there is at times an element of comedy to the group’s fanaticism, Watch The Skies attempts to get to the heart of exactly why these people are so determined to discover alien life.
Often one character or another will reiterate the saying heard in many an alien film—”We are not alone!” While this utterance is certainly familiar to many sci-fi fans, here it is phrased not as conspiracy but as comfort. Denise is often reminded by others that she hates being alone—something she has largely felt in the absence of her father. Lennart admits a similar distaste for solitude—”Good. I hate being alone,” he says, when told he will likely be tailed by armed police in his quest to acquire UFO crash site co-ordinates. The club feels like a makeshift family, all united in their quest to prove that even if they feel alone on a personal level, they are far from it on a cosmic one.
One thing which unfortunately holds back this latest version of the film is the sense of disconnect brought about by its use of AI dubbing. UFO Sweden was originally filmed in Swedish, and made available to a limited extent with English subtitles. More recently, company Flawless AI has created an English dub by having the film’s stars rerecord their lines in English, then using AI technology to match these lines with footage from the film. The intended end result is that the characters’ mouths should move as if they were always saying the English lines, to avoid a disconnect between the English dubbing and original Swedish speaking.
However, the dubbing actually exacerbates this issue—the emotion the characters are displaying visually is not necessarily reflected in their speech, recorded separately at a later date. In addition, these edited mouth movements are at times unnatural and therefore distracting. It is a shame, in a film so focused on the human heart, that this almost uncanny valley effect is imposed upon its characters. While this latest version acts as an alternative for those unwilling to grapple with subtitles, it would be good to see the original Swedish version, with English subtitles, more widely distributed.
The soundtrack for the film is nicely selected, with the bittersweet sound of Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’, a song belonging to Denise and her father, punctuating the most poignant moments. The title seems to be a nice nod to this song, too, or vice versa—”Heaven can wait, we’re only watching the skies,” the song proclaims.
The film’s one other drawback is simply that it juggles so many loose plot threads throughout that it is impossible to tie them all up by the end. Some can be easily dismissed, or chalked up to a deliberate creative choice—Denise’s questions about the universe go unanswered at times, so why shouldn’t ours? However, some larger elements go unexplained in ways that become somewhat frustrating by the finale.
The Verdict
Watch The Skies is a warm sci-fi adventure film featuring one of the more authentic-feeling found families onscreen. It rises above many other films of its genre because it doesn’t get bogged down in questions of whether there is extraterrestrial life or what form it takes—instead, it explores why we want to know so badly. It is perhaps one of the better alien films for the fact that it focuses more closely on humans.
Words by Casey Langton
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