Is AI Finally Useful In Swedish Sci-Fi Film ‘Watch The Skies’?

Courtesy of SF Studios

As you can probably tell by the title - mentioning the name of the director, writers or any of the cast and crew members who worked on this movie will most likely not ring a bell for American audiences. I will do my best to change that though because they rightfully deserve the recognition. Marketed as a love child between The X-Files and Stranger Things, the feeling you get from watching director Victor Danell’s Watch The Skies is just that - and possibly a little bit more.

Alongside writer Jimmy Nivrén Olsson, Danell is successful in turning every UFO enthusiast's dream into an exhilarating reality. But there is a catch that most would not find appealing - at first, anyways. Mixed in with the mesmerizing color palette that this sci-fi film has to offer, the mysterious red lights in the sky that teasingly hang above our main characters and the Spielberg-like mystery that somehow balances between being a family friendly adventure and a journey into a hellish landscape (that’s how I interpret it) - artificial intelligence also makes an appearance.

Before you even assume so, the AI here is not made out here to be the big bad sentient villain like in other movies. In this case, the machine learning artificial intelligence was instead used behind the scenes to match the actors' mouth movements for the English dub of the movie. The original actors came back for this - can you believe it? But from within a movie that is already trying so hard to make you believe in the impossible, does this disruptive technology help or hurt Watch The Skies?

As is the case with people, old habits seem to die hard for AI. While actress Inez Dahl Torhaug’s portrayal of young, rebellious Denise and actor Jesper Barkselius’s role as Lennart Svahn smoothly carry this extraterrestrial tale from start to finish, it's the supporting voices which reveal that this AI-injected dubbing software holds the same ol’weaknesses that is found with similar photo and video creation tools. Before I go any further, this is through no fault of the cast members themselves. They all prove to be worthy of the roles that they are in.

Whether it's through her constant run-ins with the law (which involve Sarah Shirpey’s police officer Tomi) or planning investigative missions with her new found companions at UFO Sweden (which are Isabelle Kyed’s Tona, Håkan Ehn’s Gunnar, Mathias Lithner’s Mats and Niklas Kvarnbo Jönsson’s Karl), figuring out the truth behind her father’s disappearance comes with a few unchecked hiccups. Most importantly, the AI’s mishaps. While Watch The Skies finds scintillating moments in the numerous cat and mouse chases between Denise’s small club and the police or when the group possibly comes to a breakthrough moment in their investigation, the cinematic ride comes to a full stop when the mouth movements don’t match up with the words being said.

This usually happens for the actors farther away from the camera or if there’s too many people onscreen at once - which is on a semi-frequent basis. When the syncing is on point though, the result is amazing and does promise a great future for filmmaking. To add to this, Watch The Sky’s unique color overlay (that is, an ocean-blue like lighting) helps to remind viewers that this movie’s main mission is to not be anything but wondrous. I was questioning why so much blue was being used until the first sighting of an unidentified flying object showed up about thirty minutes in. The red, rotating dots are just that - but the eerie visual just pops out so much more when you’ve been treated with only the opposite color up until that point.

As Denise is our lead focus in Watch The Skies, we quickly see that she is charged by emotion rather than logic (as we would all be if one of our parents went missing just like that). She makes it clear to Lennart numerous times that she can “hack” her way into SMHI to get the information they need. While the audience tends to believe her (she turned a Gameboy into a digital locksmith after all), the script tends to simplify the hacking aspect of Watch The Skies while amplifying the triangulating, cartographing and everything else that goes into UFO hunting. There’s nothing wrong with this outright, but using the same term over and over tends to make Denise - the protagonist of this whole thing - a bit too big for her britches.

While I can’t reveal the climax of Watch The Skies because this is ultimately a movie you should see if you like science fiction, there is one last thing I need to vaguely discuss. As the movie progresses, a major plot element is revealed to be something else entirely. While this change is equally as satisfying, there’s also a temporary change in setting which is fascinating but also terrifying. I only bring this up because I really wanted to know more about this new location. Was it Mars? Was it an alternate Earth? Was it this movie’s version of hell? There's ... lanky, eerie things moving far off in the background too. But just like that, we’re back to where we started and Watch The Skies is brought to an endearing conclusion. That was the best sequence in this movie by far - but I guess this daring scene just replicates the are-we-alone question quite well, doesn’t it?

I will give Watch The Skies a 3.75 out of 5.

Starting from July 11th, Watch The Skies can exclusively be seen at Showcase Cinema movie theatres.